A Fantastic Woman
A FANTASTIC WOMAN, drama, rated R, in Spanish with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3.5 chiles
Orlando is deeply in love with Marina. His adoration is obvious in the way he looks at her and the way he kisses her. They go home together after celebrating Marina’s birthday with a romantic dinner. In the night, Orlando falls ill. She rushes him to the hospital, but he has died from a brain aneurysm. Marina, who is decades younger than the fifty-sevenyear-old Orlando, calls his brother, who tells her not to call anyone else. He says he will take care of things.
A Fantastic Woman (from Chile), which won this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, was directed by Sebastián Lelio. It is about Marina’s (Daniela Vega) ordeal in the days following Orlando’s (Francisco Reyes) death. Orlando left his wife for Marina, a trans woman who waits tables while also honing her skills as a singer. Her very existence enrages and confounds Orlando’s ex-wife and son, who have been aware of Marina for some time and now treat her as though her love for the deceased was meaningless and his love for her perverse. She is not allowed to mourn for him, and this is not the only degradation she endures. She is questioned by police about the nature of her relationship with Orlando and repeatedly misgendered by law enforcement; she is at the mercy of men who would rather attack her than accept her. Marina remains calm even as she quietly seethes, attempting at most turns to wordlessly accept other people’s opinions of her rather than get into an argument. A Fantastic Woman often feels like magical realism, though nothing otherworldly or even questionably unusual happens in the story. That quality comes entirely from tone and style — a sensual, noir-like pacing set to a score that is part opera and part Fantasy Island at the disco — sometimes subtle and other times a strobe light. The stylistic choices help convey the depth of the very real romance between Orlando and Marina, as well as her grief as she endures numerous humiliations, but the excellent acting and storytelling do not require the additional flourish in the film’s more heavy-handed moments. Marina is indeed fantastic, with an unforced beauty and the physique of a yoga instructor, as well as intelligence, wit, and talent. Her dead lover’s contentious relatives defend their treatment of her by saying that they don’t know what they’re looking at when they look at her. She tells them, “I’m just like you.” — Jennifer Levin