A star is born in ‘Fantastic Woman’ – Mirren talks ‘Winchester’ film

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The lead character of Sebastian Lelio’s film “A Fantastic Woman “ is named Marina. She is a singer and a waitress. She has a boyfriend, Orlando, who is much older than her, but that matters little. They are clearly smitten with one another and in that post-honeymoon phase of the relationship where things are still passionate, but also calm and comforting. They’re planning a trip together. She’s moving in. Life is moving along nicely it seems.

Marina is also a transgender woman, portrayed by a transgender actress, Daniela Vega. If you’ve heard of “A Fantastic Woman,” which recently picked up a best foreign language film nomination for Chile, you’ve likely heard this fact. It might even be the only thing you know about it.

What’s astonishing about the actual experience of watching “A Fantastic Woman” is how small of “a thing” it really is, and in that way perhaps one of the truest expressions of modern transgender life that we’ve ever seen in a fictional film. Marina is just Marina. She has a delicate beauty, and a cool choppy Alexa Chung-like haircut and style. On stage, she’s performs with a sultry confidence. Off stage, she’s quieter and almost reserved, but very present, especially around Orlando (Francisco Reyes).

But one night, Orlando dies suddenly and Marina’s tranquility is thrown into a tailspin — not just from the death of her love, but from all the unnecessary and often ridiculous complications, some bureaucratic, some purely emotional, that emerge and seem to stem from the fact that she is transgender.

At the hospital where Orlando dies, the fact that her legal name is still her birth name and not Marina becomes an issue with a cop (who an uncomfortable doctor calls when she leaves the scene after he’s pronounced dead). A social worker, too, becomes obsessed with checking on Marina, which she continues to explain is just a matter of procedure and to ensure that she was not abused or a worker, but which feels nothing but invasive and inappropriate from Marina’s perspective. Orlando’s family, too, is unconscionably cruel to her — save for his brother, Gabo (Luis Gnecco), who seems to be the only person in the film empathetic to the fact that Marina is just a human who has lost a loved one.

Every day is filled with the ever-present threat that someone is going to be uncomfortable with her. Marina is gracious and accommodating almost to a fault, both to the insidiously subtle kinds of judgment and the more outward violence and hatred. Orlando’s ex-wife tells her in no uncertain terms that she is not welcome at the funeral or wake. His grief stricken son is disgusted by her and makes no attempt to hide. And all Marina wants to do is grieve in her own way.

Lelio’s film occasionally delves into some magical realism as Marina struggles to maintain her composure amid such callous inhumanity from so many people, which is a beautiful if jarring disruption in a film that’s otherwise so committed to reality.

It’s Vega’s extraordinary performance, full of grace and depth, that keeps “A Fantastic Woman” in check from becoming something either too campy or too sanctimonious. It’s one that has the power to make an audience really understand and internalize why it is an act of bravery to simply live life as herself, and perhaps even change some minds in the process.

“A Fantastic Woman,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “language, sexual content, nudity and a disturbing assault.” Running time: 104 minutes. Three stars out of four.

Also:

LOS ANGELES: Helen Mirren says her new film “Winchester” isn’t a horror flick, but rather a ghost story with foreign roots and a distinct American element — the psychological impact of gun deaths.

Mirren plays the real-life Sarah Winchester, a 19th-century heiress who inherited a massive fortune from her husband’s creation of the Winchester repeating rifle shortly after the Civil War. In the film, Winchester believes she is haunted by those killed by the firearm, which allowed for more rapid firing than previous rifles.

“It’s a ghost story, hopefully in the tradition, the very grand tradition, of Japanese ghost stories, ghost films,” Mirren said in a recent interview. “You know, the Japanese love ghost stories and have great belief in the power of the ancestor spirits, of the ancestors, as many cultures do.”

Part of the film was shot at Winchester’s mansion in San Jose, California, where she moved after the death of her husband in 1881. Now known as the “Winchester Mystery House,” it is a popular tourist attraction and has more than 160 rooms, 10 thousand windows, two thousand doors and forty staircases.

According the lore around Winchester’s life, she ordered constant construction on the home to try to confuse the ghosts she believed were haunting her.

“There are many theories why she did this,” Mirren said. “And one of the theories that we explore in the film. She was trying to placate the ghosts of the people who’d been killed by the Winchester rifle. She felt their deaths very strongly. She felt responsible. She felt the weight of their deaths upon them. And she was trying, in her own way, to placate their spirits.”

Despite “Winchester’s” themes, Mirren, 72, said the film isn’t trying to make any broad statements about gun ownership in America.

“What I like about it and I think … about America is that it doesn’t deal with whether you can carry guns or not. That’s kind of not the issue,” she said. “The issue is more putting the question mark or the weight of moral decision upon the people who make a fortune from making arms — whether they’re guns, bombs, grenades … or whatever it is. It puts a moral decision upon the people who make huge fortunes from making and then I would say the armaments dealers in the world I would like to see it… I see it personally in a much more global way.” (AP)

By Lindsey Bahr

This news has been read 4964 times!

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