Bold and Beautiful

‘A Fantastic Woman,” winner of this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, is a bold and quite moving film from Chilean director Sebastian Leilo (“Gloria.”) The movie stars a very beautiful and talented Daniela Vega, who was born David.

Vega plays Marina Vidal, a waitress and aspiring singer, whom we first see performing a popular salsa song, “Your Love is Like Yesterday’s Newspaper.”  She is cool, alluring; and her eyes meet those of her lover, Orlando (Francisco Reyes), an older man who radiates his affection for her. Cameras glide, colors are rich and saturated, images are vibrant and sensual. At a birthday dinner, Orlando promises Marina a trip to Brazil’s Iguazu Falls, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, implying that Marina is an eighth. They dance, at home they make love, then Orlando collapses and the unraveling of Marina’s life begins.

What follows is a series of exclusions as Marina is shut out of her former life. At the hospital where Orlando has been taken, she is told to leave the examination room and forced to wait in a space labelled  a “dirty zone.” When Orlando’s family descends, they ban Marina from the wake and funeral, demand she return Orlando’s car and turn her out of the apartment the couple shared.

The reason for the hostility is clear: As a transgender woman, Marina is simply unacceptable and threatens the family’s “normal” lives. At the hospital she is treated like a criminal, first by doctors and then by a police sergeant who insists she prove her identity. Orlando’s son sneers, “I don’t get what you are,” and repeatedly mispronounces her name. Orlando’s ex-wife calls Marina Daniel, insisting the relationship was a “perversion.” Through it all, Marina remains defiant, her name echoed in water motifs, including the Alan Parsons Project song, “Time” (“Time keeps flowing like a river to the sea”), to which she dances.

The film’s style is equally fluid, moving from contemporary romance into a sort of detective thriller, signaled by the discovery of a key. Then the drama shifts into a musical fantasia, with Marina flying upward toward the camera. And underneath it all is a ghost story, with Orlando reflected in glass, haunting his love.

 Having called Marina “fantastic,” Leilo invests her with the resilience of mythical heroines, sends her on a voyage to the underworld from which she must emerge strengthened. In one sequence, she visits the kingdom of the dead; in another she battles a fierce windstorm on city streets. Bold touches of magical realism adds to the fable-like qualities of the film, even give it a transcendence.

The film pays homage to Almódovar, Hitchcock, Louis Malle, even Buster Keaton and Busby Berkeley. The score by British rock musician Matthew Herbert is a character in its own right, perfectly capturing the changing moods of the movie.

At the center of all this is Vega, magnetic and beautiful on camera. She effortlessly unifies the film, capturing our attention, our sympathy and, ultimately, our hearts. She is magnificent.

“A Fantastic Woman” is playing at the Triplex in Great Barrington, Mass., and is available on DVD from Netflix.