Butler's Cinema Scene

Daniela Vega

“A FANTASTIC WOMAN” My rating: A- 

104 minutes | MPAA rating: R

What Daniela Vega delivers in the Oscar-winning (for foreign language film) “A Fantastic Woman” is less a case of acting than of being.

As a trans woman portraying a trans woman in a film scripted for her by director Sebastian Lelio and co-writer Gonzalo Maza, the Chilean actress so blurs the line between fiction and fact that the picture unfolds in a rarified realm of  ultra-realism (this despite a few moments of deliberate magic realism).

In a tale bursting with emotion and meaning,  Vega doesn’t have to push her performance. Simply by being here and reacting honestly to the screenplay’s situations she delivers a devastating, deeply moving message.

Marina (Vega) is a waitress with a part-time gig singing in a Santiago night spot. As the film begins she and her older lover, Orlando (Francisco Reyes), are preparing to celebrate with a bit of foreign travel.

But it’s not to be.  In the middle of the night Orlando has a stroke and falls down a flight of stairs.  Marina rushes him to a hospital, but it’s too late.

Most of “A Fantastic Woman” unfolds in the week leading up to Orlando’s funeral, when Marina must deal not only with her own grief but with the indignities heaped upon her by an uncaring system and Orlando’s disapproving family.

A woman police detective (Amparo Noguera) looking into Orlando’s death wonders if the signs of trauma on his body might be from abuse rather than an accidental fall. Like just about everyone else Marina encounters, the cop is outwardly civil — perhaps even sympathetic — but is that just overcompensation to mask a deeper prejudice?

A scene in which Marina must strip to be photographed by a police technician is hard to watch.

And then there’s Orlando’s ex-wife (Aline Kuppenheim) and grown son (Nicolas Saavedra), who expect Marina to turn over her lover’s car and quickly vacate Orlando’s apartment.

Things get really scary when our heroine ignores the family’s orders and shows up at Orlando’s funeral.  A few enraged cousins snatch the grieving Marina and take her on a threatening car ride.

Plenty of films have dealt with the prejudices against and misunderstandings about LBGT individuals.  “A Fantastic Woman,” though, doesn’t feel quite like any other exploration of the subject — in part because the cruelties on display are less thuggish than icily genteel.

Making it all work is Vega’s performance, a compelling  blend of grief and defiance so perfectly contained that it takes only a small eye movement or shrug of the shoulders to deliver a wealth of information. This is a heartbreaking portrait of an individual determined to keep her dignity in the face of repeated humiliations, to assert her self worth in the face of subtle (and  not so subtle) disapproval.

The end result is less like watching a performance than catching glimpses of another individual’s soul.

| Robert W. Butler