A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica)

A FANTASTIC WOMAN (Una Mujer Fantástica)               B                    

Chile  Germany  Spain  USA  (104 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Sebastián Lelio

An overly melodramatic look at the effects of machismo culture in South America, particularly in their open hostility towards the gay, lesbian, and transgender community.  Centered by a brilliant performance by transgender Chilean actress Daniela Vega as Marina Vidal, the film has a way of forcing the audience to experience the world through her eyes, becoming a near Christ-like journey of enduring the violence and humiliation from others without striking back, showing extraordinary restraint, allowing a trans actress to play a trans character onscreen, all of which only elevate the dignity of her persona.  While not in the same league as Xavier Dolan’s 2013 Top Ten List #2 Laurence Anyways or Fassbinder’s mother of all transgender films, In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden... (1978), where male actors play the roles of transgendered characters, this film is closer to Almodóvar’s trans actresses, particularly Antonia San Juan in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (1999) and Bibiana Fernández in Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (La ley del deseo) (1987), where outstanding performances generate most of the sparks onscreen.   Ironically, last year Chile’s Ministry of Education introduced measures to punish schools that didn’t allow trans kids to use bathrooms that corresponded with their gender identity, just one month after the Trump administration revoked those same protections in the United States.  A follow-up to his wildly overpraised middle-age exposé, Gloria (2013), both films are set in Santiago, Chile.  While the referenced title is never mentioned or spoken in the film, where viewers are allowed to speculate afterwards on the central performance, what is utterly fantastic are introductory images of Iguazu Falls, literally immersing the audience directly into the heart of the falls, an apt metaphor for what transpires, as it may as well be the heart of Marina Vidal leading into the opening credit sequence.  Marina is celebrating her birthday at a Chinese restaurant with a much older aristocratic lover (by 30 years), Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes), a textile company executive seen earlier looking on admiringly, even mouthing the words at Marina singing a sultry salsa number at an upscale nightclub, periodico de ayer-hector lavoe y willie colon - YouTube (6:47).  As she blows out the candles on a birthday cake, he offers a trip for two to Iguazu Falls, which they plan to visit together in ten days, while the night is rhapsodized with kisses on the dance floor, turning into a multi-colored spectrum of intimacy and romance before retreating into the bedroom of his nearby apartment overlooking the city.  

  

Whatever may feel like an anticipated love story, that’s the last opportunity to experience those fleeting feelings of romance in the air, as the film turns on a dime when Orlando feels ill but disoriented, unable to explain what’s wrong, losing his equilibrium, actually falling down the stairs before Marina can get him to the emergency room where he dies from an aneurysm.  The attending physician presumes foul play and immediately suspects Marina, pulling her off to the side, with Marina growing equally suspicious, wondering why the third degree, eventually exiting the premises in fear and disgust.  By the next morning, however, she’s up and off to work, waiting on tables at a busy restaurant, where she’s constantly interrupted by rude customers needing something and her boss reminding her she has a visitor, who turns out to be an investigative police officer from the Sex Crimes unit.  What any of this has to do with Orlando’s death is simply the way society views transgenders, as if they are deviants and criminals, making them the initial suspects in any potential crime.  Nothing points to a crime other than these unfounded suspicions that run rampant throughout the police department, and apparently attending physicians in hospitals as well.  Having initially seen Marina and Orlando together wrapped in each other’s arms, viewers have no doubts, but this is a view shielded from the rest of society, where they are instead viewed as outcasts, so they have no reason to share their stories with mainstream society, where they are routinely and often crudely ridiculed and rejected.  So the film taps into and plays with reflected mirror images, one that exists for the participants themselves, seen only by them, and another view from the outside that reeks of hostility and prejudice, filled with notions of deviant criminal behavior.  This mirror imagery is used to a meticulous extent in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (Chinesisches Roulette) (1976), literally bombarding viewers with visually reflective images, suggesting shifting psychological viewpoints, but Lelio has another motive, to play society’s bigoted views back upon itself, where the demeaning remarks aimed at Marina are more appropriately meant for the accusers, as whatever Marina may be, she is not aggressively violent or malevolent, and harbors no ill will towards anyone.  So when outlandishly offensive comments are spoken to humiliate and degrade her, they more accurately reflect back on the one making the hostile accusations.  One of the first rude awakenings comes when Marina is awakened one morning in her own shared apartment with Orlando by one of Orlando’s sons, Nicolás Saavedra as Bruno, who crudely depicts his views of Marina with growing hostility, wondering what his father ever saw in her, that their lives as a family unit were fine until she entered the picture, viewing her as filth, ordering her out of the apartment as quickly as possible.   

Orlando has a brother Gabo, Luis Gnecco from Pablo Larraín’s Neruda (2016), (with Larraín and 2017 Top Ten List #2 Toni Erdmann director Maren Ade listed among the film’s producers), who is perfectly accepting of Marina, knowing how much she meant to his brother, but he is an anomaly, as no one else from his family shares his views.  Orlando’s corrosive ex-wife, Aline Küppenheim as Sonia, openly despises her and likely called in the cops in the first place, immediately arranging for the return of her husband’s car before telling her she can’t even describe what she sees in front of her, disdainfully calling her a “chimera,” a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail in Greek mythology, before making sure she understands she’s prohibited from attending the wake and funeral services.  Tellingly, on the way to this meeting, Marina was playing Aretha Franklin on the car radio, Aretha Franklin - (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman [1967 ... YouTube (2:50), a song that epitomizes music of the heart and soul.  Meanwhile she’s confronted once again by the Sex Crimes detective, ordering an invasive full-body examination, including nude photographs by a male police photographer, supposedly to reveal no wounds, a humiliating ordeal designed to make her feel exactly as they view her, as if she’s subhuman.  Nothing, however, is as low as a return visit by Bruno, who literally kidnaps her off the street, pulling her into his van, calling “her” an animal as they rough her up, insult  and demean her in every way possible before dropping her off in an anonymous alleyway next to a garbage container.  The continual barrage of her debase harassment is really what’s wrong with this picture, as it was with Dee Rees in Mudbound (2017), for instance, as these directors feel the need to fill the screen with highlighted imagery of hatred and bigotry, to rub the audience’s noses in it, showing the wretchedness of the human condition, as if viewers aren’t sophisticated enough to deal with subtler renderings that contain the same powerfully dramatic message, where Bresson’s poetically understated film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) comes to mind.  The demeaning melodramatic fireworks actually detract from the film’s most powerful weapon, which is the immaculately placid expression on the face of Daniela Vega, offering one of the most powerful performances of the year, as she is overwhelmingly sympathetic throughout, always above the fray, making her thoughts and feelings imminently clear, becoming the heart and soul of the picture, who stands a good chance of becoming the first transgender actress nominated for an Academy Award (never happened, but she is the first openly transgender presenter at the Academy Awards).  The power of her artistry has elevated this film above and beyond expectations, as the film itself is rather conventional.  Without her there wouldn’t be much to talk about.  While fending off the goons, she retraces various stages of her life, revisiting friends from a noticeable lower-class background, attempting to navigate the extraordinary upheaval that has taken place, losing the love of one’s life in an instant, where all the possibilities of what might have happened ominously disappear, leaving an emotional void that she has to fill.  With recurring ghostly visions of Orlando, her choices get more and more interesting, slowly returning to who she is, at core, regaining her equilibrium in a dreamlike visit to the bowels of a crematorium, spending a few cherished final moments, capturing yet another side of herself, much of it existing in her own imagination, showing a resilience of the spirit that is beautifully and fantastically rendered in a splashy fantasia sequence, a bravura moment before the haunting finale, using an 18th century Handel aria that was originally composed to be sung by a male soprano castrato, a song of exceptional tenderness and care (finally allowed to appropriately grieve), sung of course by Daniela Vega herself, Daniela Vega - "Ombra Mai Fu" (A Fantastic Woman OST) - YouTube (2:52), who is a trained opera singer since the age of 8. 

Neruda

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda and Delia del Carril

NERUDA                   B-                   

Chile  Argentina  France  Spain  USA (107 mi)  2016  ‘Scope  d: Pablo Larraín

On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished.  That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.

—Pablo Neruda

One might think this is a wildly imaginative and somewhat chaotic way of revealing the interior thoughts of one of the world’s greatest poets, Pablo Neruda, yet instead, like Larraín’s other works, it remains coolly ineffectual, revealing next to nothing about the man or his poetry, becoming a kind of man-on-the-run political spoof, as the director’s mocking style simply deludes reality.  What we do know about Neruda cannot be found in this film, as it makes no attempts to be biographically informative, but instead persists on examining just one of the post-World War II years in Chile when Gabriel González Videla was President from 1946 to 1952.  After receiving support from communists to get elected, which at that time were split with the socialists, at the urging of the United States the nation banned the Communist Party, first expelling them from the cabinet before outlawing them as a political party in 1948, a ban that remained in effect until 1958.  With a crackdown on communists who were subjected to mass arrests, stripped of their right to vote, poet and Communist Senator Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) offered a seething rebuke to the President, first at an outrageously surreal political gathering set inside a lavish public urinal the size of a department store with all the distinguished guests present before criticizing the President for “selling out to the United States” in a speech before the National Congress.  Shortly afterwards he was forced underground where he remained in hiding for the next thirteen months before spending the next three years in exile after escaping over the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback, a story dramatically recalled during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1971.  From the champagne parties with naked revelers to his bohemian relationship with fellow artist Delia del Carril (Mercedes Morán), it’s clear Neruda was no ordinary communist, where the rules of the game made exceptions for his presence.  Delia joined the French Communist Party after the First World War, as she was studying painting in Paris at the time, where they initially met in the mid 1930’s when she was 50 years old and he was only 30, but their age difference was offset by her intelligence, vitality, and beauty, as their home became a meeting place for the great intellectuals, artists and writers of the time.

Unfortunately Larraín’s unsettling and overly confusing film won’t make a dent in Neruda’s popularity, which was buoyed immensely by the massive popularity of the film Il Postino (The Postman) (1994), a fictional film based on a novel inspired by an incident in Neruda’s life, the only foreign-language film to be nominated for a Best Picture Award in more than 20 years, where the theatrical run was so long (almost two years), it was still in theaters after the video release and its initial cable run.  Gabriel García Márquez called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language,” while New York Times book review critic Selden Rodman observed after the poet’s death, “No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans,” yet surprisingly this film contains little poetry, doling it out almost exclusively through narrative passages, as instead the film invents a plot device in the questionable character of Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), a fascist police inspector that hounds him through his various escape routes, always one step behind, taunted along the way with notes placed in books of poetry left behind by Neruda.  This fascination with an alter-ego is along the lines of Sherlock Holmes and his infamous Moriarty, while the cat and mouse game alters the entire mood of the film, offering a playful, illusionary tone that has the effect of keeping the viewers off-guard as well, as Peluchonneau is something of a delusional fool, “half moron, half idiot,” as he’s described near the end, yet the film is narrated throughout by his less than trustworthy character, where the entire film exists in a kind of bogus stream-of-conscious netherworld.  It’s a choice made the director that has a way of preventing identification with any of the characters, remaining elusive and overly detached.  If interior passages of Neruda’s poetry had played a more significant part, adding emotional resonance to the communist struggle, for instance, this might have been an ingeniously inventive film, but as is, it feels strangely convoluted, where the artist himself remains distanced from those workers and peasants that he claims to maintain solidarity with throughout his journey.  Instead, while he escapes, we see them rounded up, arrested, and simply thrown into prison while he continually remains protected.  The chaotic nature of the film may reflect the extent of his alienation, but it offers little contact with the struggle, and no evidence of hope, where instead he remains bogged down by his own existential struggles.

Perhaps the most damning part of the film is its refusal to embrace the artistry of the poet, where we rarely, if ever, actually see him write or spend any time in reflection, where instead he’s shown as aloof and indifferent, having little regard for others.  While this is a landmark moment in Chilean history, onscreen we find Neruda partying in brothels with the bourgeoisie, showing a fondness for his sensual vices, where we never see that side of him that millions embrace through his writings.  While there is a reference that 10,000 union workers were moved to a stunned silence when he brought a piece of paper out of his pocket to read, or that he read his poetry before 100,000 citizens in Brazil, it is the power of his words to embrace human equality and to discover a common worldwide humanity, where his message of communism and worker’s rights is what made him dangerous to the government.  Yet we don’t get a hint of that, instead we’re bogged down by this idiot game with a delusional police inspector that doesn’t even exist, where the best he can do is drive around in circles in front of the Presidential Palace blowing the car horn to ensure the President doesn’t get a good night’s sleep, adding the comical element of farce to the psychological deficiencies of his tracker, continually moving from place to place, becoming a road movie simply by the changing locations.  While new poems are presumably mailed to the masses to keep the underground movement thriving, all we see are trips to the mailbox, as we don’t hear the poems, or see anyone other than the inspector reading them.  This disconnect prevents the viewers from learning more about the significance of this artist, as what lines of poetry we hear are mentioned right alongside the mysterious inner thoughts of the psychologically challenged police inspector, who yearns to catch his man, gather fame and adulation, while learning to be a bit of a poet himself.  Of course, none of that ever happens, so the messenger actually dilutes the message.  There is no transcending force that unites the artist with the struggle, instead the film seems more concerned about showcasing the police inspector’s ultimate failure, as if fascism would be overthrown or undermined by a lack of conscious, all of which feels strangely disconnected from the real cause. 

Postscript (not in the film)

The ultimate irony is that Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, the year after the Chilean Communist Party nominated him for President.  He withdrew his nomination to make way for Socialist nominee Salvador Allende, who in 1970 became the first Marxist candidate to be a democratically elected President in any South American country, appointing Neruda to be the ambassador to France, returning to Chile in 1973 due to poor health, just in time for America’s intervention in a CIA sponsored coup d'état, surrounding the capital with troops, removing Allende from power by force (he allegedly committed suicide the next day), replacing him with a fascist military dictatorship lead by General Augusto Pinochet that remained in power until 1990.  Pinochet’s dictatorship dissolved Congress, suspended the Constitution, and began a persecution of alleged dissidents in which thousands of Allende supporters were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.  Among them may have included Pablo Neruda, who was hospitalized with cancer, where he died under mysterious circumstances, with a doctor injecting an unknown substance into his stomach, with Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, claiming he was poisoned, perhaps under the orders of Pinochet, as he died six hours later.  What ultimately happened remains a mystery.  In contrast to JFK’s historic funeral procession, as shown in Larraín’s film Jackie (2016), where over 100 foreign dignitaries showed up and the entire nation watched on public television, Pinochet refused to allow Neruda’s funeral to become a public event, where it took place under a massive police presence, with Neruda’s house broken into, his papers and books taken or destroyed, while thousands of Chileans disobeyed the curfew and demonstrated on the streets.