Updated
Chile's entry for the Best Foreign Film at the Oscars is a film noir homage about a transgender woman mourning her lover.
Its director Sebastian Lelio is an Argentine-born Chilean whose last film, Gloria, was a minor key tale about a middle-aged woman who starts dating again and meets a man who isn't all that he seems.
He's had gastric surgery to alter his body shape, his ex-wife seems to exert a strong influence still and he was once in the military… but he doesn't talk much about that.
It was a nuanced character study, but it also spoke about the lies and self-deception of a generation who came of age under the Pinochet dictatorship and don't want to admit to what they did, or who they once were.
Lelio now returns with A Fantastic Woman, also a film in which people try to forget history.
Trans actor Daniela Vega plays a trans cabaret singer named Marisa who's in a relationship with a much older man.
When he dies suddenly in her arms, she faces suspicious authorities and has to deal with her lover's ex-wife and the rest of his upper-middle class family.
They want to pretend she never existed, and ban her from the funeral. She won't have it.
With a haunting, impressionistic score from Englishman Matthew Herbert that recalls the more dreamlike music Bernard Hermann wrote for Hitchcock, and cinematography that depicts the city of Santiago as a glittering yet alienating sprawl, A Fantastic Woman is lush and ominous.
Vega is a force of nature — steely eyed, stylishly dressed — and Lelio's film is a compelling showcase for her enigmatic magnetism.
She is full of contrasts: feisty enough to climb on top of a car in a skirt at one point, but also capable of expressing vulnerability.
But as she rises to clear each obstacle — including an ominous interrogation at the police station and several spiteful encounters with her lover's family — Lelio's film doesn't quite rise to match her.
It detours into visual ideas that are often playful, like a shot of Marina walking against the wind, or a choreographed dance scene inside a disco that's a cathartic release, but underdelivers on its early menacing cues.
It could be that Lelio is not interested in the way that thrillers about women in danger often rely on an element of sadistic spectacle. Marina is no quivering Hitchcock blonde.
But if A Fantastic Woman is at times a thoughtful, sophisticated subversion of genre, it feels strangely muted in its later stages, like it's split by two creative impulses running on parallel tracks.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, film-movies, social-systems, academy-awards-oscars, discrimination, community-and-society, gender-roles, chile
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