A Fantastic Woman

Premiered at Berlin a few months before its creator Sebastian Lelio’s first foray into English-language filmmaking with the Rachel Weisz-starring , sees the Chilean writer-director taking another angle on the tale he told in his 2013 breakthrough : that of a down-on-her-luck woman restrained by social mores that ultimately prove too small to contain her. Where, true to its title, resolved itself into a Laura Branigan-styled power ballad about the sexual potency and resiliency of its eponymous fiftysomething heroine (Paulina Garcia, who will be replaced by Julianne Moore in Lelio’s forthcoming remake), in Lelio raises the dramatic stakes without substantially deepening his text, offering an undercooked character study that, loosely revolving around its heroine’s thesis that “saying goodbye to a loved one when he dies is a basic human right.” Despite the classical referent and a diverse stylistic palette that ranges from realist tracking shots to impressionistic mood lighting, the film never quite elevates its subject the way it clearly intends to, flattening pressing real-world issues into tired bromides. Worse, it reduces its own ostensibly fantastic heroine to a stereotypical vision of a trans woman’s suffering as beautiful and noble—making the film into the kind of sympathetic outsider story that only a well-meaning outsider to a particular community could tell.