She is a she. You have to start there. If you cannot comprehend that the subject of this is film was assigned masculine gender at birth but currently identifies as feminine, this is not the movie for you. Of course at that rate, you probably shouldn’t be voting, either. Some things are, apparently, too adult for basic comprehension.
The story doesn’t start with transgender songstress Marina (Daniela Vega), but instead her lover, Orlando (Francisco Reyes). It’s Marina’s birthday and Orlando has arranged for a dinner and a vacation to be named later. After an evening of celebration, Orlando has a brain aneurism. He wakes up, falls down the stairs leading down from their shared flat and dies on the way to the hospital. At this point, the movie becomes all about Marina and her awful life in Santiago, Chile, so you better get used to her.
In the relative dark of the restaurant, the apartment hallway, the bedroom, the car racing through the city at night, Marina can easily pass as female without question. The clothing, the body language, the presence all say “female.” Within the glow of the brightly lit hospital, however, it becomes clear that Marina has a distinctly masculine jaw, male musculature, and (lack of) curves. This is not going to jive with everybody. As if that part isn’t difficult enough, her driver’s license still says “Daniel,” the apartment she shared with Orlando isn’t in her name, and the new corpse of Orlando is bruised from falling down stairs.
The truth is, when you put your mind to it, you can misconstrue anything — you need look no further than modern punditry to understand this lesson. Out of habit, grief, or both, Marina chooses isolation in her life. This only makes the police wonder what she has to hide. Orlando being roughly twice Marina’s age doesn’t help, either. Orlando’s extended family channel their own grief –for the most part- into anger; it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of imagination to find where that anger gets directed.
For the rest of the film, Marina is treated from the outside essentially as a circus act. You can’t get it unless you see it, and you’ll never truly understand it without living it. All of Marina’s non-friends take one of three approaches: 1) sympathetic understanding, 2) hostility, or 3) freakish
curiosity. A few of those she interacts with combine #2 and #3. When Orlando died, Marina was closer to him than any other person in the world, yet Orlando’s ex-wife and blood relatives are only too happy to claim all of Orlando’s life, even going so far as to shut Marina out of a funeral appearance. Her presence is shameful, ugly, wrong.
Needless to say, A Fantastic Woman is an upbeat romp-and-a-half. It’s a feel good adventure for the whole family. Seriously, A Fantastic Woman is a sympathetic, thorough, and disquieting character study; it may not be the best transgender portrait ever committed to celluloid, but if you can emerge without feeling something, congratulations, and I hope you never discover the family members of yours who are LGBTQ. Trust me, they exist.
Now alone, a woman must be bold
“You’re a man” over and over, she’s told
Within this sea of scorn
All she wants is to mourn
Appropriately, this Chile leaves me cold
Rated R, 104 Minutes
Director: Sebastián Lelio
Writer: Sebastián Lelio, Gonzalo Maza
Genre: Modern discrimination
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: LGBTQ Sympathizers
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Mike Pence
