The Look, Confounded: A Fantastic Woman is a Film About Films About Transphobia

[Reposted from my Tumblr page.]

The most prominent thought I had as I watched Sebastián Lelio’s Oscar-nominated A Fantastic Woman (Una Mujer Fantástica, 2017) was how literate the film is in transgender cinema compared to other transgender films I watch. As Marina (Daniela Vega) is thrust through a gauntlet of transphobia following the death of her boyfriend, the film doesn’t merely replicate the common tropes of both transgender cinema and transgender life; it seems to understand that they are tropes, that what’s going on in Marina’s life is a set of recurring phenomena throughout both life and, perhaps more importantly, media representations of trans people. I can’t help but compare the film to the also-Oscar-nominated The Danish Girl (2015), another film that ostensibly serves as a social issue film centered on a transgender protagonist. On its face, A Fantastic Woman is much like The Danish Girl: a straightforward social issue drama that puts a trans woman and her troubles on display for a majority-cis audience to feel good about being on the liberal side of the issue. But I hated The Danish Girl and loved A Fantastic Woman, largely because The Danish Girl was constantly enveloped by tropes the filmmakers didn’t seem to understand and A Fantastic Woman not only seemed to understand the tropes but work against them. If The Danish Girl was a clueless attempt at transgender advocacy, then A Fantastic Woman may be the opposite: a commentary on films like The Danish Girl and how films go about depicting transphobia in the first place.

A Fantastic Woman covers almost every stereotypical trans issue imaginable, from pronoun drama, name drama, and deadnaming to the suspicion that Marina may have killed her boyfriend in response to him attacking her. I believe firmly that the sheer range of tropes covered is much of the point of the film, that it goes out of the way to cover so much ground as part of its awareness of itself as a trans film. The only other film I can think that consciously plays with transgender cinema tropes so much is Boy Meets Girl (2014), a film that’s also keenly aware of its own trans film status. Where some films attempt to avoid existing trans cinema tropes altogether, A Fantastic Woman and Boy Meets Girl each explore those existing tropes by engaging them in order to ultimately defy them.

Both Boy Meets Girl and A Fantastic Woman prominently comment on the treatment of transgender nudity. Boy Meets Girl does so by giving its trans protagonist a nude scene, one that’s radically honest and genuine rather than sensational or revelatory. A Fantastic Woman, on the other hand, deliberately avoids full frontal nudity in order to avoid answering the question that multiple characters pose to Marina in different ways: have you had The Surgery? The difference makes sense: whereas Boy Meets Girl grapples with the romantic and sexual implications of trans womanhood, A Fantastic Woman is concerned entirely with the non-sexual, non-romantic implications of trans womanhood in a transphobic society. The film not only fails to show Marina’s genitals, it goes out of its way to very nearly show them without ultimately giving the audience the satisfaction, as it were, of knowing. The film progressively gets nearer and nearer to such a reveal as an audience might expect from experience with films like The Crying Game, but the film confounds the audience’s look with repeated refusals for resolution of a question that ought never have been asked. In one of the final scenes, we see Marina naked on her bed, and cut to see that she’s holding a mirror over her genitals: a mirror that reflects her face. Thus the film both evokes the genital reveal trope and the mirror trope to subvert both: instead of signifying vanity or hyper-visibility, the mirror reveals something about audience attitudes towards trans people. Instead of Marina’s genitals, we get a glimpse of her face, which ultimately is what (if anything) should signify her. The mirror, rather than revealing Marina’s body and reducing her to her genitalia, gives Marina power over her own image.

But the film’s insight goes further. By regurgitating a wide array of transphobic tropes, the film overloads itself with all the expected issues that social issue dramas are supposed to raise. The film raises so many different issues so systematically that one begins to think that the film is not just about transphobia but actually about the representation of transphobia. The film refuses to conquer or resolve transphobia: it offers no conversions of transphobes into the good liberal fold, and it offers no resolution to the trans angle of the story, which lacks a recognizable arc like the transition narrative so prevalent in The Danish Girl. The film questions the very idea of putting a fictional character through what the film puts Marina through by failing to locate meaning in the prejudices and traumas of transphobia (something The Danish Girl does) or make a metaphor out of trans identity itself (something The Danish Girl really does). Instead the film is a nihilistic barrage of blows to Marina that, in spanning the spectrum of transphobic media tropes, simply highlights the tropes themselves as represented by the myriad unkind and violent characters Marina must deal with. The film’s savvy lies in knowing how to evoke all these tropes without being subsumed by them, particularly through the character of Marina, who resists her reduction to stereotypes by the characters around her. By bookending the film with moments unrelated to Marina’s trans status — her relationship with Orlando and her singing on stage — the bulk of the film becomes a film-within-a-film: a surreal litany of stereotypical awfulness needlessly heaped on one character who stands on the outside looking in and refuses to be defined by tragedy or hardship. In doing so, the film takes to task films that have tended to approach transgender advocacy by focusing on the tragic while at the same time not denying the difficulties that trans people face. A Fantastic Woman is not a film about transphobia; it’s a film about films about transphobia. The film subtly confronts classical liberal transgender cinema, and even the social issue drama itself, by questioning the logic of fictionalizing the traumas of the marginalized for consumption by the mainstream.

Epilogue

When I saw that A Fantastic Woman won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film last night, I was elated. Despite my pessimistic reservations about the reasons it won — did voters miss the subversive angle and take it for another Danish Girl? — and my reservations about the Oscars in general, it’s refreshing to see such a great and genuinely deserving film get some recognition. When it comes to trans people, the Oscars have tended to mostly reward cis people playing trans people (Hilary Swank and Jared Leto) in the exact sorts of films that A Fantastic Woman critiques while more powerful and groundbreaking films have gone unacknowledged, most not even coming anywhere near the Oscars. More importantly, though, this win ensures that more people will see A Fantastic Woman, and that’s what counts.