Chilean drama ‘A Fantastic Woman’ features marvelous Daniela Vega

• Critic's rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Daniela Vega is a vision.

When we first see her character, Marina, she’s at a nightclub, singing sultrily through a smile she can’t suppress, her red lips matching a flower in her hair. It’s easy to see how a man could fall hard for her, especially a man like Orlando (Francisco Reyes). He’s older, grayer, with a failed marriage in his past and a taste for the finer things. Marina, with her shy smile and attentive affections, is clearly one of those finer things.

That Marina is transgender is not immediately apparent, and in the moment, immaterial. She is a woman in love like any other, celebrating her birthday, blushing over cake and the promise of a romantic getaway to Iguazu Falls. That is, until Orlando suddenly dies, leaving Marina alone to navigate grief and indignity. Then her gender becomes very much material.

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“A Fantastic Woman” is a superb Chilean drama, at times infuriating but never despairing. Vega is an empowering presence who never wavers in the assertion of her own humanity even as its stripped from her, even as she’s called homophobic epithets and dumped heaving in an alleyway, her features monstrously distorted by tape wrapped around her head.

The indignities are immediate. At the hospital where she rushed Orlando, whose body now lies cold, the doctor offers Marina not comfort but suspicion. An investigating officer demands identification and aggressively uses male pronouns, not even trying to mask his disgust. When she calls Orlando’s brother to tell him the news, he beseeches her not to contact the rest of the family. He doesn’t have to say she would be an embarrassment; she gets it by his tone.

She’s badgered to hand over the car she shared with Orlando, the apartment, even the dog. And she isn’t even to think of showing up for the wake. Marina isn’t afforded any dignity in her grief. She is an inconvenience, and her loss is compounded by society’s unwillingness to let her experience it with dignity.

“A Fantastic Woman” is timely, important and unavoidably political, but it never loses focus on Marina, who demands dignity and compassion, not for any larger social movement but simply as a woman in pain. The film remains firmly in her head and heart, and is shot through with touches of grace and moments of sublimity. Marina stumbles raw and unkempt through alleys, hospitals and saunas, but she also sparkles in fantasy sequences, moving like honey through tinseled dance numbers and auditory dreamscapes, Orlando haunting the periphery of her vision.

The film doesn’t need to make a case for Marina’s basic humanity and smartly avoids clichés of persecution storytelling, instead ceding the floor to Vega’s magnetic presence and soulfulness. She is a marvel, and if one doesn’t come away loving her as Orlando did, it’s no shortcoming of the film.

Reach the reporter at bvandenburgh@gannett.com. Twitter.com/BabsVan.

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‘A Fantastic Woman,’ 4 stars

Director: Sebastián Lelio.

Cast: Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes.

Rating: R for language, sexual content, nudity and a disturbing assault.

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