Film Screening and Panel Discussion:
Mourning, Knowledge, and the Voice in A FANTASTIC WOMAN (Sebastián Lelio, 2017)
Janice Lieberman, PhD, Isaac Tylim, PhD, Anna Fishzon, PhD, LP
Sebastián Lelio’s 2017 film, A Fantastic Woman, testifies to the violent forms the search for knowledge can take, and the importance of mourning and sublimation for the subject. The mesmerizing trans mezzo-soprano Marina Vidal, played by the mesmerizing trans mezzo-soprano Daniela Vega, has an adoring older boyfriend, Orlando (Francisco Reyes). They are in love; they celebrate Marina’s birthday and discuss a trip to Iguazú Falls; they go dancing, return home, and have sex. In the wee hours, Orlando wakes up in distress and collapses, it turns out, from an aneurysm. The frightened Marina rushes him to the hospital but he cannot be saved.
Twenty minutes in, and Orlando is no more. His death is sudden and unexpected. He had not put his affairs in order, nor established a place for Marina in his will and within his family. The remainder of the film is about Marina trying to mourn Orlando, to attend his wake and funeral despite the resistance of Orlando’s son and ex-wife; to care for their dog, Diabla; to grieve and memorialize the fullness of the man she knew. In essence, to bury him. In order to do this, she must be acknowledged by others as his partner and his beloved. She must be recognized as a woman and as his woman.
The main preoccupation of Marina’s various enemies—Orlando’s family, the police, and the medical examiners—is the question of what is down there, between her legs. In a sense, it consumes Marina and Lelio, too, as both she and the film work hard to resist an easy solution to the issue of her sexual identity, an identity not reducible to genitalia.