The grieving process
There are "right now" movies, and there are movies you expect will live on and linger for all time. It's not, I don't think, an insult to A Fantastic Woman, the 2017 Berlinale competitor and winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, to say that it's 100% a "right now" movie, and it will be the surest sign of the film's success when it has been more or less forgotten. How's that for a backhanded compliment, then?
Basically, the movie is primarily about one thing: Daniela Vega, a trans woman, is playing Marina Vidal, a trans woman. That this is, in 2018, noteworthy enough to build an entire feature around it and give it awards reflects terribly poorly on the film industries of all nations (A Fantastic Woman is Chilean, with substantial financial backing from Germany, and a bit less substantial financial backing from Spain and the United States). Nonetheless, it's the world we live in, and so as far as that goes, it's better to have A Fantastic Woman than it would be to not have it.
Besides, setting aside the particulars of her biography, building an entire movie around Vega's ability to act in it has proven to be a winning gambit for writer-director Sebastián Lelio and co-writer Gonzalo Maza. It's hard to suppose that the story's fairly limited range of tones and conversational scenarios could have been particularly taxing for Vega, but she's beyond terrific anyways, playing what could easily fall into trite "the weepy suffering of a tragic queer" boilerplate as written by two well-meaning cisgender men with a disarming strain of "are you fucking kidding me?" irony directed at the awful people around her. It's a sardonic performance in the heart of a very earnest Message Movie - one that demands those capital Ms - that helps to make this a little more interesting and emotionally engaging than it could very easily have been. Also, Vega is a singer by training (A Fantastic Woman is only her second movie), and so the film includes a couple of musical numbers for her at very key moments, and she has an amazing voice, an ethereally low contralto - which is due to the particulars of her biography, no doubt - that is used so pointedly and sparingly that it has an extraordinary impact when the film finally asks her to fully open up and power through an aria.
In Vega's hands, Marina is such a specific character that it overcomes how little is intrinsically interesting about the film containing her, either as a story or a work of visual art (which is all almost identical to Leilo's last film, also a movie that existed largely to facilitate a phenomenal lead performance, 2013's Gloria. I would say, though, that A Fantastic Woman looks more interesting). The plot opens with a bit of sleight-of-hand: we do not first meet a woman, fantastic or otherwise, but a 50-something man, Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes), leaving his spa and traveling through Santiago to meet his much-younger girlfriend Marina at the nightclub where she performs as a second job (her first is waiting tables at a diner). It's her birthday, they've just moved in together, everything seems pleasant and stable and nice, and then he dies of an aneurysm. The perspective switches over to Marina as she's trying to get the confused, fading Orlando to the hospital, and from there on out, we never leave her, as she attempts to cope with being thrown into disarray from the loss of her lover, while being given absolutely no space to grieve by Orlando's estranged wife Sonia (Aline Küppenheim) and resentful adult son Bruno (Nicolás Saavedra), who both hate her for her role in taking Orlando away, and hate her even more for being trans (Orlando's brother Gabo (Luis Gnecco) likes her fine, but is a coward).
So that's a misstep. This is a message movie, as mentioned up above, and it has the message movie's inherent incapacity for subtlety or grace notes. The thing that the film absolutely does not want us to notice is that, viewed from the outside, the family has a legitimate grievance: Orlando was tomcatting around with a woman half his age, and is ready to leave much of his apparently considerable wealth to her, despite having known her for only about a year. That could yield something fascinating even without sacrificing any of the film's allegiance to Marina; but for whatever reason, the filmmakers don't want to muck things up morally. So loud, violent, one-note transphobia it is to be, and entirely at the cost of the plot's rationality. It's not Sonia and Bruno's movie, they're just villains in the background, but villains are best when they make sense, and these characters don't: they seem to be entirely animated by disgusted hatred of Marina as a trans woman, and only secondarily (and quite a distant second!) by their own feelings of loss. Which, given the film's reliance on Marina's subjectivity, perhaps makes sense, but it leaves the distinct feeling that A Fantastic Woman is interested only in the most blunt, simplistic binaries of People Who Are Good and People Who Are Wicked.
Even if we're to leave that aside, there's a terrible interesting thread the film raises and then ignores: the frustrated grieving process, in which Marina cannot deal with what's happened in her life because the assholes in the Onetto family are forcibly shutting off her avenues to properly mourn. It's not not there, and the film's best scenes are the ones where this comes to the foreground; but it's not what the film is about. It's about staking the claim that trans people are people, and should be treated with the respect due to persons, and I hope to God nobody reading this disagrees. But that's a moral claim, not a dramatic claim.
Anyway, the film's thinness as a story is largely compensated for by Vega imposing a personality on the character and material that aren't quite there without her. It's also nice that Leilo and cinematographer Benjamín Echazarreta (who also shot Gloria) have decided to flesh out the story and Marina's place in it with some judiciously-used bright colors; like the songs, they're not used all that often, but in just the right spots to dominate the whole movie, while also making it feel very palpable when those colors and the energy they bring along are missing.
Lastly, the film has a bravura thriller scene in which Marina goes undercover as a man to infilitrate a locker room. It has, frankly, nothing to do with the rest of the film, but it's lively and has a real transgressive kick that I saw nowhere else in the film, and both of those qualities are very much welcome in something that feels so transparently built to win awards.
Basically, the movie is primarily about one thing: Daniela Vega, a trans woman, is playing Marina Vidal, a trans woman. That this is, in 2018, noteworthy enough to build an entire feature around it and give it awards reflects terribly poorly on the film industries of all nations (A Fantastic Woman is Chilean, with substantial financial backing from Germany, and a bit less substantial financial backing from Spain and the United States). Nonetheless, it's the world we live in, and so as far as that goes, it's better to have A Fantastic Woman than it would be to not have it.
Besides, setting aside the particulars of her biography, building an entire movie around Vega's ability to act in it has proven to be a winning gambit for writer-director Sebastián Lelio and co-writer Gonzalo Maza. It's hard to suppose that the story's fairly limited range of tones and conversational scenarios could have been particularly taxing for Vega, but she's beyond terrific anyways, playing what could easily fall into trite "the weepy suffering of a tragic queer" boilerplate as written by two well-meaning cisgender men with a disarming strain of "are you fucking kidding me?" irony directed at the awful people around her. It's a sardonic performance in the heart of a very earnest Message Movie - one that demands those capital Ms - that helps to make this a little more interesting and emotionally engaging than it could very easily have been. Also, Vega is a singer by training (A Fantastic Woman is only her second movie), and so the film includes a couple of musical numbers for her at very key moments, and she has an amazing voice, an ethereally low contralto - which is due to the particulars of her biography, no doubt - that is used so pointedly and sparingly that it has an extraordinary impact when the film finally asks her to fully open up and power through an aria.
In Vega's hands, Marina is such a specific character that it overcomes how little is intrinsically interesting about the film containing her, either as a story or a work of visual art (which is all almost identical to Leilo's last film, also a movie that existed largely to facilitate a phenomenal lead performance, 2013's Gloria. I would say, though, that A Fantastic Woman looks more interesting). The plot opens with a bit of sleight-of-hand: we do not first meet a woman, fantastic or otherwise, but a 50-something man, Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes), leaving his spa and traveling through Santiago to meet his much-younger girlfriend Marina at the nightclub where she performs as a second job (her first is waiting tables at a diner). It's her birthday, they've just moved in together, everything seems pleasant and stable and nice, and then he dies of an aneurysm. The perspective switches over to Marina as she's trying to get the confused, fading Orlando to the hospital, and from there on out, we never leave her, as she attempts to cope with being thrown into disarray from the loss of her lover, while being given absolutely no space to grieve by Orlando's estranged wife Sonia (Aline Küppenheim) and resentful adult son Bruno (Nicolás Saavedra), who both hate her for her role in taking Orlando away, and hate her even more for being trans (Orlando's brother Gabo (Luis Gnecco) likes her fine, but is a coward).
So that's a misstep. This is a message movie, as mentioned up above, and it has the message movie's inherent incapacity for subtlety or grace notes. The thing that the film absolutely does not want us to notice is that, viewed from the outside, the family has a legitimate grievance: Orlando was tomcatting around with a woman half his age, and is ready to leave much of his apparently considerable wealth to her, despite having known her for only about a year. That could yield something fascinating even without sacrificing any of the film's allegiance to Marina; but for whatever reason, the filmmakers don't want to muck things up morally. So loud, violent, one-note transphobia it is to be, and entirely at the cost of the plot's rationality. It's not Sonia and Bruno's movie, they're just villains in the background, but villains are best when they make sense, and these characters don't: they seem to be entirely animated by disgusted hatred of Marina as a trans woman, and only secondarily (and quite a distant second!) by their own feelings of loss. Which, given the film's reliance on Marina's subjectivity, perhaps makes sense, but it leaves the distinct feeling that A Fantastic Woman is interested only in the most blunt, simplistic binaries of People Who Are Good and People Who Are Wicked.
Even if we're to leave that aside, there's a terrible interesting thread the film raises and then ignores: the frustrated grieving process, in which Marina cannot deal with what's happened in her life because the assholes in the Onetto family are forcibly shutting off her avenues to properly mourn. It's not not there, and the film's best scenes are the ones where this comes to the foreground; but it's not what the film is about. It's about staking the claim that trans people are people, and should be treated with the respect due to persons, and I hope to God nobody reading this disagrees. But that's a moral claim, not a dramatic claim.
Anyway, the film's thinness as a story is largely compensated for by Vega imposing a personality on the character and material that aren't quite there without her. It's also nice that Leilo and cinematographer Benjamín Echazarreta (who also shot Gloria) have decided to flesh out the story and Marina's place in it with some judiciously-used bright colors; like the songs, they're not used all that often, but in just the right spots to dominate the whole movie, while also making it feel very palpable when those colors and the energy they bring along are missing.
Lastly, the film has a bravura thriller scene in which Marina goes undercover as a man to infilitrate a locker room. It has, frankly, nothing to do with the rest of the film, but it's lively and has a real transgressive kick that I saw nowhere else in the film, and both of those qualities are very much welcome in something that feels so transparently built to win awards.
