– by Cate Marquis –
Chilean director Sebastian Lelio’s A FANTASTIC WOMAN is indeed a fantastic film, with a fantastic performance by its star Daniela Vega, who plays a fantastic woman of dignity and grit facing prejudice because she is transgender, as she copes with the loss of her older lover. A FANTASTIC WOMAN is one of the nominees for the Oscar in the Foreign Language category and the lead contender to win the award.
Marina (Daniela Vega) is a waitress and singer who has just moved in with her older lover Orlando (Francisco Reyes). Marina is graceful, elegant and golden-voiced, and at first she appears to be a pretty young woman like any other. But when Orlando suffers what turns out to be an aneurysm in the middle of the night, her gruff treatment at the hospital reveals that she is transgender. The doctors and medical staff ask pointed questions about her name, refer to her with a masculine pronoun and seem rudely curious about her anatomy. When Orlando’s family show up, they treat Marina like the unwelcome other woman, with a restrained disdain. Marina bears it all with a quiet dignity and poise. Part of the source of their disdain is the difference in ages between Marina and Orlando, part is a difference in social class between her modest background and his wealthy family, but another is the fact that Marina is transgender, and all that implies in Chile.
In his previous film GLORIA, director Sebastian Lelio dealt with the dismissive treatment of a middle-aged woman by paternalistic Chilean society. In this film, he looks at another person marginalized by that same social structure. Marina’s cool treatment by Orlando’s family is one thing, the kind of treatment his ex-wife and grown children might give to any younger lover, but with an extra level of unpleasantness and homophobia. But the intense interest by the police in Marina and her body has unsettling parallels to the Nazis.
READ THE FULL REVIEW AT WE ARE MOVIE GEEKS:
http://www.wearemoviegeeks.com/2018/02/fantastic-woman-review/
