Later this evening, I’ll be leading a discussion after a screening of the Academy Award-Winning film A Fantastic Woman at the Bright Family Screening Room at Emerson College. I’m very excited to do this: I love this film.
I love how it shows Marina’s inner life without being overt. Much of this is shown directly through Daniela Vega’s performance, but there are times when the film uses a kind of emotional impressionism, such as the scene where Marina is walking against the wind and she’s leaning forward, almost parallel to the ground, still pushing forward.
I love the various ways the film represents her isolation: the cold, almost stalkerish way the camera follows her from across the street, or from behind. Even in the wide shots, she’s alone, vulnerable. There’s a time when she has, as nearly as we can tell, been entirely abandoned. It rains, and she has nowhere to take cover, so she keeps walking. What else can she do? Sometimes there’ll come a close-up, and Marina will look directly into the camera, meeting our regard, offering a challenge and a reproach.
And yet, she is saved by her allies several times in this movie. At the end of that walk through the wind and the rain, she comes to a friend’s apartment. They let her in. That resonated strongly with my own experience. A trans person who goes through gender realignment faces significant loss. I know of virtually no one who’s gone through transition who would disagree. But we’re also held together through our support system. Without that refuge, without people in our lives who accept us, we’re in an almost insurmountably difficult position.
A Fantastic Woman shows this to us. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Marina is unflaggingly determined. She despairs. She’s brought low more than once in the course of the film’s story. But she keeps moving and the world moves around her: often in opposition, sometimes in support, though it often feels like the opposing forces are stronger and more prevalent.
Ultimately it’s her own determination that brings her some closure and some peace. It’s her own strength, scant moments here and there of good fortune scattered in with the catastrophe she faces, including a few friends, that carry her through to a new stability.
Some of the movies I’ve seen about trans people seem to be directed mainly at a cis, heteronormative audience: fewer are aimed specifically at trans folk themselves. A Fantastic Woman speaks to all audiences. It universalizes Marina’s experience by placing us at times at that stalkerish distance, and at other times letting us look over her shoulder, and also staring at us levelly, through Marina’s eyes. When she experiences transphobia, no punches are pulled. Some characters in this movie are very up front in their hateful attitudes. Marina is seen as a suspect for no other reason than her presence and the fact of her history. Those who care about her are shown no less honestly.
Marina herself makes foolish choices, though we fully understand and sympathize with her reasons for making them. She is neither a saint nor a warrior. But even so, given the chance, she faces the ugliness of her circumstances and gives back beauty. When we get to the final scene of the film, a long shot that pushes in to a tight close-up, what is revealed through also exposes our own humanity.
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