A Fan­tas­tic Woman

Vega plays Mari­na, a young trans singer who is in a com­mit­ted rela­tion­ship with Orlan­do (Fran­cis­co Reyes), a man 30 years her senior. They have plans to build a life togeth­er which are abrupt­ly cut short by his sud­den ill­ness, leav­ing Mari­na adrift in the world, forced to face the ire of her boyfriend’s dis­ap­prov­ing fam­i­ly. It’s a sto­ry that has played out onscreen many times before with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, and Lelio’s script leaves a lot to be desired in this respect.

Aside from the char­ac­ters of Mari­na – and to a less­er extent Orlan­do – there is lit­tle room for char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. The thoughts, fears and moti­va­tions of oth­er char­ac­ters are fair­ly one-note, with the revul­sion of Orlando’s ex-wife and son towards Mari­na being lim­it­ed to her being con­sid­er­ably younger than him and a trans woman. Only Orlando’s broth­er is shown as sym­pa­thet­ic towards Mari­na, but he is lit­tle more than a footnote.

The film would do well to explore these atti­tudes more than it does, but in pre­sent­ing almost every sin­gle frame of the film from Marina’s per­spec­tive, there is lit­tle room to show any­thing but her inter­nal strug­gle. As such, we watch as Mari­na goes about her dai­ly drudgery in the wake of her lover’s death, attempt­ing to piece her life back togeth­er. She’s played with an enchant­i­ng sense of restrained vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, pub­licly put-togeth­er but pri­vate­ly falling apart. She strug­gles to rec­on­cile the man she loved with the fam­i­ly he had, par­tic­u­lar­ly their hos­til­i­ty towards her, threat­ened by a per­ceived dan­ger she pos­es to the fab­ric of their family.

Lelio attempts to deal also with the injus­tices many trans peo­ple are sub­ject to – in one tense scene, Vega is forced to strip naked by police offi­cials who believe she was being abused by her part­ner, and she is fre­quent­ly mis­gen­dered by oth­er char­ac­ters. This humil­i­a­tion speaks to the real-life dis­crim­i­na­tion thou­sands of trans women and men face across the world every day.

A Fan­tas­tic Woman is a film on the cusp of great­ness – Ben­jamín Echazarreta’s dreamy cin­e­matog­ra­phy lends it an ethe­re­al qual­i­ty, as does Matthew Herbert’s flute-heavy score, cap­tur­ing the way Marina’s spir­it seeks to break free from the con­fines placed on it by soci­ety and Orlando’s fam­i­ly. Yet it’s hard to shake the feel­ing that some­thing is missing.

The film starts off strong, and it is refresh­ing to see a trans woman por­trayed as hav­ing a life beyond her trans iden­ti­ty. Such char­ac­ters are lack­ing in cin­e­ma, and Lilio does make an attempt – as he did so suc­cess­ful­ly with 2013’s Glo­ria – to shine a light on an under­rep­re­sent­ed community.

But sub­plots lead nowhere, and the film fre­quent­ly threat­ens to fiz­zle out alto­geth­er. There is an unfin­ished qual­i­ty to A Fan­tas­tic Woman that does a dis­ser­vice to the undoubt­ed­ly inter­est­ing char­ac­ter at its cen­tre, and its mes­sage (beyond preach­ing the tol­er­ance that Mari­na nev­er finds her­self) is unclear. The solu­tion seems evi­dent – give the resources to trans film­mak­ers and screen­writ­ers so that they might tell their own sto­ries, rather than these being imag­ined through the lens of cis artists.