It’s frustrating when a great performance is trapped in a mediocre film. Such is the case of Daniela Vega, an immensely gifted performer and one of the most extraordinary recent breakout talents. In fact, she made history as the first transgender actress to receive an Oscar campaign for Best Actress (but was not nominated). She plays Marina Vidal in Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Lelio’s new drama “A Fantastic Woman” — a standout piece of acting marred by weak, unimaginative direction.
Marina is a transgender nightclub singer who works as a waitress by day. Her longtime partner, Orlando (Francisco Reyes), gifts her a trip on her birthday. They party and make love, but he wakes up in the middle of the night acting strangely. Soon, he collapses. Marina rushes him to the hospital, where he dies. She calls his good-natured brother Gabo (Luis Gnecco), who helps her handle the incoming family members. In the coming days, the police pester her for fleeing the hospital in a moment of fear, as does Orlando’s intolerant sister Sonia (Aline Kuppenheim), who refuses to invite her to the funeral.
Essentially, “A Fantastic Woman” is trying to be two things — a melodrama about the psychological state of grief and a social realist picture about transgender rights. Lelio flounders in both regards, but Vega’s performance knocks both out of the park. The two are clearly working together but are not on the same wavelength.
Lelio’s boring grab-bag of formal tricks is pulled straight from the toolbox of modern art house cinema, notably magical realism and elliptical storytelling. Simply, these techniques have been employed to much greater effect by his contemporaries. In particular, the magical realism provides a somewhat effective, if rudimentary, window into Marina’s psychological state. Orlando often appears to her as a ghostly presence, and she is individually swept up in cataclysmic weather. But other Latin American filmmakers have adapted this literary tradition in more thoughtful ways. Lelio also leans too far into the visual language of mirrors, with many shots focusing on Marina’s reflection. These shots are a nice touch at first, considering all of the questions it brings to mind about identity and perception, but it becomes yet another overused trick fairly quickly. If there is one piece of praise to give Lelio, however, it is that he captures the emotion in Vega’s face with some level of care.
On the other side of the coin, not enough praise can be thrown at Vega’s central performance. “A Fantastic Woman” lives and dies by her ability to carry the emotion of the film on her shoulders, and she far surpasses any expectations of an actress. Few performers have ever been such a natural screen presence, and you can’t take your eyes off her. She navigates the film’s stylistic tightrope perfectly, registering every naturalistic and melodramatic beat with the utmost precision and power. Sadly, it often feels as if she had no collaborative role in telling this story, though she’s the most qualified person on set to do so.
It is crucial that filmmakers consider telling the stories of people who aren’t like them, otherwise the world of cinema would be nothing but navel-gazing nonsense. But questions of representation come with that consideration, and telling those stories must be done empathetically and collaboratively. Here, Lelio fails. Vega’s performance — the magnetic pole of the film — feels imprisoned by his lens. She could break free and take the film in the right direction, but Lelio traps her within his austere regurgitations of auteurist style. Every time I saw him pulling the puppet strings, I wanted to reach into the screen and slap his wrists. He’s too timid of a filmmaker to tackle this story, refusing to allow it to become the great melodrama it could be and constantly dragging it back into didactic territory. What a Douglas Sirk, Pedro Almodovar or Todd Haynes could have done with Vega’s performance and this concept would have been magical.
Despite this interior rift in quality, “A Fantastic Woman” has real social value. By shedding light on transgender issues in an accessible format, it does something that few films have achieved before. The casting of Vega in the lead role is a watershed moment. But one wishes that this moment belonged to a better film — and that a better filmmaker was receiving the accolades for it. In the end, it’s a crying shame that Lelio didn’t take notice and allow a fantastic woman to lead the way.
Grade: B-
