A Fantastic Woman
It might have happened a little later on in the festival than I would have liked, but yesterday I caught a Competition title that’s actually worth getting excited about. Sebastián Lelio, last at the Berlinale in 2013 with his widely acclaimed, Jury Prize-winning divorcée drama Gloria, returns with a thoroughly worthy follow-up. A Fantastic Woman offers an intimate and engrossing portrait of Marina (Daniela Vega), a young trans woman whose older partner Orlando (Francisco Reyes) unexpectedly dies after a night out.
Without resorting to cheap sentimentality, Lelio deftly depicts the numerous ways in which the odds are stacked against Marina in all aspects of her life. She frequently experiences the indignity of being misgendered, while doctors and police officers are quick to assume that Orlando’s death must have been drug or sex-related. But the biggest obstacle she faces comes in the form of Orlando’s family, most of whom have struggled or flat-out refused to accept the couple’s relationship. The chief draw here is Vega’s formidable central performance, with Marina exuding a quiet determination that feels utterly authentic, and which ensures that the character is never rendered pitiful or tragic. Vega is surely the one to beat in the Competition’s Best Actress race – if the jury needed an extra incentive to bestow that honour upon her, this would make her the first trans actress to receive a major festival award. Lelio, meanwhile, leavens the understated naturalism with a few slick fantastical sequences, offering further insight into his protagonist's inner life. A few on-the-nose moments threaten to derail things – the decision to have Marina singing along in the car to Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” is a regrettable misstep – but on the whole this is precisely the kind of slick prestige fare you’d expect to be in contention for the Golden Bear.
Alas, I was brought down to earth with a small thud this morning by Bright Nights, the latest by Berlin-based festival regular Thomas Arslan, last here with the Western Gold in 2013. Like A Fantastic Woman, its narrative hinges around an unexpected passing – in this case, with civil engineer Michael (Georg Friedrich) learning that his father has died suddenly from a heart attack. Enlisted with the task of travelling from Berlin to his dad’s home in the Norwegian countryside, Michael takes his estranged teenage son Luis (Tristan Göbel) along for the ride, and attempts to turn the trip into a holiday of sorts, with less than spectacular results.
Arslan seems to be gunning for the kind of unassuming poetic realism that the likes of Kelly Reichardt and the Dardennes brothers excel at. But there’s nothing remotely engaging about the world he’s exploring here. The father-son dynamic plays out utterly predictably, from the initial silent awkwardness, to the tentative bonding, to the explosive climactic argument and ultimate reconciliation. We learn nothing unexpected as we suffer through this tedious road trip, save, perhaps, for the comically unexciting revelation that Martin’s father had completed a manuscript about tunnel building shortly before his death. The sense of boredom is compounded by precisely the kind of artfully muted visuals you’d expect from a solemn slice-of-life drama. About 20 minutes in, the woman next to me pulled her coat over herself like a blanket and settled in for a nap. If this, as its billing might indicate, is really the cream of current German cinema, then heaven help us.