At the recent Academy Awards A Fantastic Woman pulled off the historic double feat of claiming both the first-ever Oscar win for Chile – taking home the award for Best Foreign Language Film – and the first Oscar win with a transgender actor in the lead. But in Cambridge, UK – during its first week of release – Sebastián Lelio’s film was only screened erratically, at one cinema and at the audience-unfriendly times of midday on Tuesday; Wednesday at 11pm; and Sunday before noon. “A coincidence,” staff on duty told me, but ironic treatment for a feature which at its core dramatises the reduced space granted to transgender people, and their struggle to remain visible against the tide of mainstream culture.
From its opening scenes, A Fantastic Woman establishes itself as a drama of access; as a yearning for space without the right keys or codes. In images swollen with impending trauma, older male love object Orlando – named surely for Virginia Woolf – who will die the same evening from a ruptured brain aneurysm, can’t locate the plane tickets to Iguazú Falls he has stored away as a surprise for his romantic partner, the magnetic Marina Vidal, played by transgender activist Daniela Vega. At the celebration dinner held hours later at a Chinese restaurant for her birthday, where waiters gather to sing around their table, Orlando confesses to not knowing where the tickets might be hiding. Marina, boldly outfitted in an okra-coloured dress, teases him in the languid tone of established relationships – “Poor, senile old man” – and casually drapes her arms around his shoulders.
The film takes its cues from David Lynch in its incremental movements towards the claimed ‘fantastic’ of its title. At first, the discriminations staged against Marina – who, in her capacity as a transgender woman, is denied the right to grieve publicly for her cis male lover – are what poet Claudia Rankine describes as instances of ‘micro-aggression’, or brief quotidian verbal and behavioural discriminatory slights, as opposed to full-on slurs. At the hospital where Orlando is registered as having passed away, she is looked over quizzically by various officials and asked to clarify her relationship to the deceased more than once. Following a tense encounter with a visibly repulsed policeman, she is pressured into producing an ID card, and after doing so, triumphantly referred to by her still-unchanged legal title, ‘Sir’. In a later scene, Orlando’s bigoted ex-wife demands that Marina hand over her lover’s car in the vaulted space of an office car-park, where colleagues will not witness the encounter. Despite calmly going through with the exchange, Marina is still treated with demeaning levels of respect and told by the wife, as if she were an object in a Wunderkammer of perversion, “I don’t know what I see when I look at you… perhaps a kind of chimera”.
A chimera is potentially a wispy thing upon which to balance the material oppression of trans women, yet it is consistent with the rest of A Fantastic Woman’s repertoire of specular motifs, and interest in mirrors, costume, pantomime, and stages of all kinds. Building upon Laura Mulvey’s tracing of oppression back to an initial experience of being looked at or evaluated by another’s gaze, A Fantastic Woman asks us what we ‘see’ when confronted with Marina’s story, and, in the process, exposes film, love and identity formation as suspended theatres of projections rather than established frames. Throughout the film, Marina is coerced by various bystanders – Orlando’s son, doctors, and a particularly toxic investigative reporter – to reveal whether she has had The Operation. Yet, in line with trans activism’s efforts to respect transitioning subjects’ privacy and to validate the state of being ‘in-between’ independent of biological coordinates, Lelio refuses to provide an answer either way. During an abrasive scene in a forensic crime unit, where detectives ‘need’ to ascertain whether her relationship with Orlando was criminal or abusive (despite her oral testimony to the contrary) Marina is asked to strip from the waist down. The detectives register the sight before them, yet the camera remains steadfastly, boldly, at navel level. While looking then, is revealed as crucially constitutive of identity formation, we are asked to approach such activity as open-ended, and not to observe Marina in crudely voyeuristic terms.
A Fantastic Woman does not shirk from visceral depiction – one scene, in which Marina is kidnapped, verbally abused and taped over the mouth in a speeding 4×4 by Orlando’s son and friends after daring to attend her lover’s funeral, is precariously balanced on the limits of the watchable. Still, another refusal is present in one of A Fantastic Woman’s most compelling tropes: a handsome, yet unannotated locker key, which was on Orlando’s person when he died, and bequeathed to Marina at the hospital after his death. In the absence of last words from her lover, and amidst an escalating climate of hate and exclusion, it is arguably not surprising – though she does not know at first what it opens – that Lelio’s protagonist clings to such a talisman throughout the film as a possible escape route. When she serves a customer at the restaurant where she works – a cruel inversion of the earlier indulgent birthday scene – and he nonchalantly lays a key of apposite design and colour on the table – her investment in the object as a fetishised potential portal to elsewhere is almost painful to observe. The motif is common in the history of cinema borrowing, as A Fantastic Woman’s cinematographer Benjamin Echazarreta has ascertained in interview, most graphically from Hitchcock. Later, when Marina has found out that the key grants access to a locker at a nearby sauna and makes a pilgrimage after work to scour the grimy, towel-lined corridors, Lelio almost goads the audience into thinking the worst. Having seduced the audience with the most obvious solution – that the locker will contain the longed-for ticket to Iguazu Falls – the seamy environs prep the viewer for a seedier reveal. What follows is a brutal observation on our tendency to thread substantial narratives from nothing. When Marina opens the locker there is nothing inside.
A Fantastic Woman resonates most strongly as a story about who is permitted to grieve. In this way, it resonates with Judith Butler’s work in Precarious Life, which, in a post-9/11 context, probes the ethical question of which lives are liveable and which are razed from the ground of public monument, exploring how mourning, in such a context, is increasingly state-defined. “Without the capacity to mourn,” Butler writes, “we lose that keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence” a sentence which is still – in the context of the film and elsewhere – sharply applicable. Tellingly, another motif in Lelio’s feature is an at-home boxing bag, to which Marina often has recourse in the wake of some of A Fantastic Woman’s most frustrating scenes. In the film’s penultimate sequence, Marina gives it a quick punch before exiting her new apartment – she has been bought out of the one that she shared with Orlando – and moving out into the night. An arsenal of anger-management techniques is still, even after the dispute with Orlando’s family has been ‘settled’, necessary. Without sufficient space to flourish the entangled energies of grief – and the repeated internalisation of everyday aggression – are inevitably re-trafficked. Yet, despite pointing viewers to the habitual grooves of prejudice, Lelio’s film refuses to trace obvious circuits. The last place that we might expect Marina to end up after the parade of indignities she has suffered and following a bout of frustration is on stage, singing an opera aria after a long absence from the profession. Yet, after brief engagement with the punchbag, singing Handel’s ‘Ombra mai fu’ – a pointed musical meditation on how nature respects all living beings on an equal footing – is exactly where we find her, and what she does.
Alice Blackhurst is a writer and researcher based at King’s College, Cambridge
