Death is already an awful interruption to life in a literal and a metaphorical way, but it is exponentially worse for those who are left behind and forced to deal with the logistics. A Fantastic Woman explores that upheaval and the additional complications that a transwoman named Marina has to face when experiencing that loss. That loss is just senseless and cannot make any retroactive sense. The key is simply to survive the storm with who you are and what you want.
Counterintuitively A Fantastic Woman starts its focus on Orlando, Marina’s boyfriend, and we are introduced to Marina and loss, a vague, unsettling, unresolved feeling that worms its way into life, through his eyes. Normally I would take umbrage to a woman being defined by her relationship to a man, but in this specific context, we need to establish the nature of their relationship to understand how willfully blind others have to be to ignore this reality. A majority of the film is sustained focus on seeing Marina, which makes others’ inability to see her and treat her with even minimal respect more frustrating. She is a singer deeply in love and has made a good, comfortable life.
After death, Marina is depicted as trying to salvage normalcy and minimize the damage to her life. She is shown hitting a punching bag before she has to go into the public world and serve the same function. She handles the increasingly inconvenient and rude confrontations with a preternatural calm, dignity and strength. When she suffers the most violent indignity and vainly tries to recreate her last normal night, it produces an oneiric, fantasy sequence that delivers what she is looking for: transcendence, identity affirmation and a brief glimpse of a loved one’s shadow. When she briefly erupts at the final straw, I cheered for her and jeered at the pearl clutching of those who treated her poorly. When she finally gets some form of closure, she can get peace and solitude and never has to deal with those particular people’s BS again. She emerges with less than what she had, but more of herself.
A Fantastic Woman combines realism and magical realism to convey an emotional, subjective reality and produce empathy as we witness the casual, systematic, almost impersonal cruelty that Marina has to weather at the worst possible time. In depicting the specificity of her experience, it evokes the pain of separation for the audience. Marina acts as an involuntary lightning rod for all of the deceased’s family’s unresolved issues with the deceased and themselves and society’s assumptions about her life based on her gender and sexuality. She instantly loses a loved one, and in some measure, herself because her autonomy is seized by officials and the deceased’s relatives who unreasonably demand her time, her service, her space, her soul and her body.
The worst culprit is the anti-Olivia Benson who only gives lip service to understanding Marina’s position, but deems her guilty because of who she is. Marina’s existence is a crime. On one hand, the woman detective has a job to do, but on the other, she would not have treated a cis woman automatically as if she was a suspect and a sex worker, especially once she knew that Marina is a waitress. The best moment is a casual one. The abuse has finally taken its toll on Marina, and she casually makes a self-condemning remark about her features in a primarily female space, and the person gently dismisses it, “Nonsense.” This person is completely uninvested in how Marina feels and sees hands all day. She would know. Marina finally gets treated like a normal person, not a monster or someone special. It is such a normal moment, but it feels like an oasis.
A Fantastic Woman does an exquisite job of not only making Marina feel like a whole person with a full life that will continue to unfold after the movie ends, but it does so with its supporting characters as well. I got a sense of Orlando’s life as much from what is omitted as what I was shown.
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Orlando was a clearly a POS at some point early in his life and had some kind of life epiphany to end on such a high note. Marina is his third, best and last major relationship and perhaps the only one where he was completely giving. He had at least two relationships before because he leaves behind a son who is a complete jerk and worries about how his father’s life reflects on who he is as a person and a second ex-wife who is completely self-absorbed and unable to face reality that her relationship with her husband was done, and reality did not resemble whatever she thought it was. At some point, Orlando shared some of their negative qualities to have lived a life with them. His brother is decent, but too accommodating of hate.
Marina’s sister and music teacher are her only cheerleaders. I had the sense that her brother-in-law would be less than thrilled to share an apartment with his wife’s sister whether she was cis or trans. He just wants to lead a conflict free life that means erasing or avoiding reality whereas Marina’s sister is more confrontational. Marina is more neutral, but I loved that her breaking point was her dog, especially since that dog did not need to be with that loser bag that gave him up because of his smell. Knowing that spiteful jerk, he would have ended up eventually giving that dog to a shelter. I’m sure if that dog could talk, he would have chosen Marina too. It speaks well of Marina as a person that her main priority is the dog, not the apartment, money or the car, especially when moving is one of the most stressful parts of life.
If A Fantastic Woman was more realistic, the son and his friends would have murdered Marina. Most people don’t have tape when they are at the post office shipping packages or packing up to move, but you just happen to have it handy after a wake so you can commit a hate crime. Not that the police would care since they seem more determined to misgender, deadname and violate Marina’s civil rights than conduct a proper investigation.
Because of the oneiric quality of A Fantastic Woman, I am not completely certain that even the most realistically depicted events actually happened. The sequence in which Marina investigates the locker key, takes a literal journey backwards and unsexes herself to find some answer to the mystery and meaningless of Orlando’s death which only leads to emptiness and oblivion felt parallel to her following his specter after a brief, somewhat fearful reenactment of their last night together to his actual body before it gets cremated, literal consumption. I know that it emotionally happened for Marina, but did it happen in the real world? Did she actually have an opportunity for open confrontation? She got the dog so maybe or is the end just a fantasy. I know that most people won’t view A Fantastic Woman as open-ended as I did. I hope that Marina got her happy ending.