A Fantastic Woman (2017) by Sebastián Lelio: A Transnational Portrait of Transgender Experience

Abstract

A Fantastic Woman (2017) by Sebastián Lelio: A Transnational Portrait of Transgender Experience Sandra Ortiz-València “Cuando te veo, no sé, no sé lo que veo. Una quimera, eso” (Lelio). This is one of the multiple verbal and physical assaults that Marina, as a trans woman, has to endure while she grieves the recent death of her lover, Orlando. After spending a romantic night together, both rush to the hospital because he has had a heart attack. Unfortunately, he passes away that night. In the days after his sudden death, Marina is forced to confront his family’s objection to their relationship. Before dating Marina, Orlando was married and had a family, and she is seen as a disruptive presence —not just for dating Orlando, but also because she is trans. She is aggressively harassed by Bruno, Orlando’s youngest brother, prevented from attending the funeral, and questioned by the police. No one can comprehend, much less condone, Marina’s existence in Orlando’s life: the fact that she is trans presents challenges to the heteronormative, cis-gendered Chilean society. In rejecting the relationship between Marina and Orlando, society is attempting to deny her the right to grieve the loss of her lover. However, Marina is undeterred. She fights back against the collective rejection in order to reclaim that right. A Fantastic Woman (2017) adds the complexities of transgender experience to a story of loss and grief. The director, Sebastián Lelio —undoubtedly influenced by masters of the classical melodrama, such a Nicolas Ray and Douglas Sirk— constructs a dazzlingly beautiful piece on Marina’s journey that exposes the experiences and struggles transgender individuals encounter on a daily basis. In fact, A Fantastic Woman is part of a trans-national trend in popular culture that has voiced the concerns that affect transgender people and other members of the LGTBIQ+ community. This phenomenon is particularly striking in Latin America, whose cultural production presents a long-lasting literary and cinematic tradition in the representation of non-normative subjects. Two of the most canonical examples would be: El beso de la mujer araña (1976), written by Manuel Puig and adapted to the screen in 1985 by Hector Babencho, and El lugar sin límites (1966) by José Donoso and adapted by Arturo Ripstein in 1978. Of late, Latin American [End Page 33] cultural production has been characterized by an increase in works revolving around LGTBIQ+ issues, as the filmography of Lucía Puenzo, Marco Berger, Diego Lerman, or Lorenzo Vigas illustrates. A Fantastic Woman is a new addition to this cultural trend, one that reached an extraordinary international success, especially after being recognized as the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. As Patricia Gherovici puts it: “the word transgender has experienced a ‘meteoric rise’ and [. . .] has become an everyday term” (1). Pieces such as Lelio’s film that deal with transgender issues may seem odd or perverse to some mainstream audiences, given that these works aim to negotiate their conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality within a heterosexual visual framework (Fuchs and Holmlund 4). They row against the tide, but they “unravel identity as a construction,” forcing viewers “to reconsider how we think about other forms of difference” (Ghrerovici 3). Transgender experience pushes forward fluidity as an essential element in identity and “highlight[s] the plasticity, contingency, and arbitrariness of categories like race or gender” (Ghrerovici 5). This is precisely what Lelio’s film does: dismantle traditional heterosexist ideological determinations and pave the way to transform society into a more inclusive and accepting place. By proving that gender identity is a construction, the film lays bare the multiple possibilities for categorizations of sex, gender and sexuality, and calls for an immediate change in social values to protect and respect the multifaceted nature of individual identity. Despite this increasing visibility and presence in the public arena, transgender individuals have little control over their representation, which tends to be instrumentalized and rendered through a voyeuristic lens, rather than one focused on the genuine experiences of these individuals (Gherovici 16). Interestingly, A Fantastic Woman subverts this trend by presenting a story that effectively equates transgender and cisgender heterosexual experiences...