A Fantastic Woman: Oscar-winning transgender drama

The plot to A Fantastic Woman — directed by Sebastián Lelio, and winner of the 2018 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film — is simple, almost nonexistent, really, because this film is primarily a character study. 

In Santiago, Chile, Marina (Daniela Vega) has a relationship with Orlando (Francisco Reyes), a man 20 years older. One evening, after a romantic dinner and a promised getaway to Iguazu Falls, Argentina’s equivalent to Niagara, Orlando falls ill and is rushed to the emergency room. He dies. 

As the events unfold, it becomes apparent that Marina is a trans-woman, Orlando is cis-gendered, and she has to explain to the disbelieving police that theirs is a “healthy, consensual relationship between two adults.”

Trans can mean transsexual. 

Orlando’s  family (ex-wife, son, others) immediately swoop in for the dog, the car and the shared apartment, attack Marina as perverted, condemn her sexual identity as an aberration, refuse her pleas to attend the funeral, shame and harass her, even brutally assault her with cord and tape wrapped around her head, turning her face into something grotesque and monstrous.

Marina goes through her days stunned but determined to survive. She maintains her dual jobs as waitress and club singer, answers the accusatory police questions who force her to resume the name Daniel as it still appears on her ID, and undergoes humiliating genital exams from a doctor wanting to see for himself just what’s between her legs. Yet she continues her singing lessons as she tries to make sense of Orlando’s death and the subsequent death of their future together, a financial and emotional future very much determined by the older man. So now she's on her own.

Trans can mean transgressive.

The cinematography by Benjamin Echazarreta is exquisite. Opening with shots of the thundering cataracts of Iguazu Falls on the border of Argentina and Brazil, overwhelming in their power and majesty, the camera shifts to Santiago and these two people, no real background, no exposition or explanation. We simply are there as their love unfolds before us, though we may still be scratching our heads as to just what is occurring here. 

As we slowly learn a few more details about Marina and Orlando — pieces of the puzzle sliding into place, but still no big picture to fully spell out just what is going on — the camera dazzles us with shimmering, reflective surfaces of storefronts, bathroom mirrors, windows, elevator doors, car wash, windshield, sunglasses, water, even a distorted wobbly mirror being carried by workers down the street. There are repeated journeys as Marina travels down, down, down various staircases — into the labyrinth, into the catacombs, into the strobe lights of a neon den — Orlando’s falling down the stairs hastening his own death, Marina’s flight down the stairs to an underground bar and dance club, parking garage, back stage theater dressing room, sauna, crematorium. Orlando makes ghostly appearances wherever Marina goes.

Slow, lyrical tracking shots give us a Marina barely surviving her confusion and grief, staring into the middle distance, or seeing herself repeated ad infinitum into a mirror reflecting a mirror, a likely homage to Welles’ Citizen Kane. But as she puts one stilettoed foot in front of the other, she endures. In one powerful shot, both shocking and mesmerizing in its quiet intensity, indicative of her still-evolving sense of who she is, and who she is not, Marina lies naked in a bathtub, her legs spread, but over her crotch is a round mirror reflecting her face, genitals replaced by her trans-identity. In a beautifully realized piece of cinematic irony, Marina goes to Orlando’s gym searching for clues, and to enter the male side of the sauna, she must cast off Marina and revert to being Daniel in the locker room with bare chest and towel around his waist. Though a trans woman, Marina can at times seem not so far removed from her male past, and she herself refers to her football player legs and orangutan hands, and keeps a punching bag for boxing practice in her apartment. Occasionally in wild flights of magical realism, Marina becomes a soaring dance queen in a demimonde underground dance/sex club, desperate to anesthetize her pain. Another time, Marina finds herself walking into a windstorm, a brutal assaultive gale like her own life these days, leaning at a 45-degree angle just to stay in place. One cannot but think of a similar iconic scene from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr., perhaps unrelated here but a great reminder of a character who held on and pulled through.

Trans can mean transformative.

As she speeds down the highway, why are we not surprised that it’s Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like ) A Natural Woman” on the car radio?

And while I’m at it with cinematic references to Welles and Keaton, let me add a nod to Pedro Almodovar — this film is right out of Almodovar’s playbook of strong Spanish women with alternative sexualities, fighting and persevering in a patriarchal, heteronormative world (consider his Volver, Julieta, Broken Embraces). Not a bad triumvirate of Welles, Keaton and Almodovar to which we now can add the name of Sebastián Lelio. 

Director Lelio sees his own work here as a film of “aesthetic splendor, narrative vigor, tension and emotion…both a celebration and examination of its main character." He asks what will the viewers see when they see Marina, a woman, a man, or the sum of both?

"They will see a human being who constantly changes before their eyes, who flows, vibrates, and modifies herself. But what they are seeing isn’t precisely what they are seeing, and this condition turns Marina into a vortex that attracts the viewer’s fantasy and desire, inviting them to explore the limits of their own empathy.”

Whew, that’s a lot of fancy talk, and that's a lot for a film to carry on its transsexual shoulders, but it really does encapsulate what this movie is all about.

At one painful moment in the film, the ex-wife Sonia (Aline Kuppenheim) spews invective against Marina, calling her a chimera, that is, a hideous monster. Well, I’ve always wanted to use the word chimera in a film review, and here’s my perfect opportunity. In Greek mythology, a chimera is a fire-breathing she-monster with lion’s head, goat’s body and serpent’s tail. But it’s also come to mean anything that is hoped or wished for, but is in fact illusory and impossible to achieve. 

It’s a fantasy, a daydream, an illusion, a figment of one’s imagination. 

A Fantastic Woman features just such a blend of disparate parts and perfectly realizes this notion of fantasy and illusion. Beautifully filmed, sensitively portrayed — after all Daniela Vega is a transgender woman herself —so for the first time in cinema, a trans woman is playing a trans woman. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl with Eddie Redmayne — certainly a stunning portrayal of the transsexual experience — pales in comparison with Vega's frisson of insight and connection from within.

And those singing lessons? The end of this film soars in an unexpected coda, startling and satisfying. We move from Aretha Franklin to Handel's aria "Ombra mai fu" that Daniela Vega herself sings! It's as chilling and thrilling an example of survival that one can imagine.

Trans can mean transcendent.

Ben Wiley is a retired professor of film and literature at St. Petersburg College. He also was on staff in the Study Abroad Office at University of South Florida as statewide Director of the Florida Consortium/University of Cambridge (UK) International Summer Schools. His interests are in film, books, theatre, travel, literacy programs, kayaking Florida rivers. Contact him here.

This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2018.