Sebastián Lelio’s Fantastic Women

When A Fantastic Woman premiered in Berlin in 2017, Kiang wrote in her Playlist review that “after the exceptional Gloria [2013],” Lelio had returned “in a different, semi-Hitchockian register, to give us another stunning, deeply involving portrait of a woman with the borderline superhuman capacity not to hate herself for who she is, no matter who else does.”

The film won the Berlinale’s Teddy Award, and Lelio and cowriter Gonzalo Maza won a Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for their story of Marina (Daniela Vega), a trans woman cruelly shunned by the family of her late lover. A year later, A Fantastic Woman became the first Chilean film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Writing for Notebook, Leonardo Goi called A Fantastic Woman “an achingly powerful tale of resilience, a love story in the purest sense of the term: a film that challenges the structures dictating the ways love between two people should feel, look, and sound like.”

Born in Argentina, Lelio was two when his parents split and he and his mother moved to the Chilean coastal city Viña del Mar. After graduating from the Chilean Film School, he made several short films and the 9/11 documentary Cero (2013). The Sacred Family (2005), his debut feature, was a hit on the festival circuit, and his follow-up, Christmas (2009), premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight program in Cannes. The Year of the Tiger (2011) premiered in competition in Locarno—and then came the international breakthrough with Gloria.

Paulina García won a Silver Bear in Berlin for her performance as “a feisty, free-spirited fifty-eight-year-old divorcee, putting aside the pain of past relationships in her search for passion, companionship, and a partner who shares her zeal for dance,” as Maria Delgado wrote in Sight and Sound. For a time, Gloria finds that partner in Rodolfo (Sergio Hernández), who at one point asks her, “Are you always this happy?”

“García exudes the humanity of Carmen Maura’s genial Pepa in Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), with the sexual energy of Diane Keaton’s Theresa Dunn in Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977),” suggested Delgado. Reviewing this “astute, unpretentious, and thrillingly humane” film in the New York Times, A. O. Scott sensed that Lelio was “also interested in the way a humble individual destiny illuminates the condition of a society still shadowed by its history of military dictatorship and political violence.” But Lelio was “wise enough to avoid overthinking or didacticism. He is interested, above all, in showing Gloria exactly as she is, which is beautiful.”

By this point, if Pablo Larraín “had established himself as the dark prince of new Chilean cinema with spiky, perverse, politically bristling works like Post Mortem and No,” writes Guy Lodge in Variety, “Lelio was poised to become its great humanist: his touch light but not soft, his perspective probing but not abrasive.”

A little over half a year after A Fantastic Woman made a splash in Berlin, Disobedience (2017) premiered in Toronto. Rachel Weisz had approached Lelio with Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, and Lelio cowrote the adaptation with playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Her Naked Skin). Weisz stars as Ronit, a photographer based in New York who learns that back home in London her father has passed away. He was a respected rabbi in an Orthodox community that has put some distance between itself and Ronit.

When she arrives in London, Ronit is thrown off to learn that two old friends, Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), one of her father’s favorite students, and Esti (Rachel McAdams), Ronit’s lover when they were teenagers, have married. Disobedience is “a transfixing consideration of love, faith, sexuality, and personal freedom,” found the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “The tone, like the muted light and color palette of Danny Cohen’s cinematography, is one of careful restraint, which makes the roiling emotions beneath the characters’ surfaces all the more compelling.”

Julianne Moore proposed remaking Gloria as an American film, and the result was Gloria Bell (2018). In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis found that both Moore and Paulina García inhabit the character “so deeply that the performance can feel like a possession. Beat for beat and subtly different line for line, the two movies can seem eerily alike; Lelio has likened Gloria Bell to a cover version.” He was also “playing with the idiom of the women’s picture, but he self-consciously approaches the genre with expressionistic flourishes—ripples and blasts of color, luminous and diffuse lighting—that show his debt both to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and to old Hollywood.”

The Wonder (2022) is an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel set in a rural Irish village when, in 1862, a young girl claims that she hasn’t eaten in four months and is living on “manna from Heaven.” Florence Pugh stars as a nurse tasked with keeping an eye on the girl and—as the villagers hope—confirming the miracle.

The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee found that The Wonder “pulses with ragged frustration, which slowly morphs into a more defined fury; the recently, horribly recognizable kind that comes from watching others reject facts that fail to fall in line with their worldview, no matter who gets hurt. It’s by no means anti-religion but it’s proudly anti-religious extremism, tersely challenging the priorities of those who will pick sacrifice over safety. It’s all incredibly involving and infuriating without once leaning into the showy histrionics and overwrought melodrama a less delicate and intelligent adaptation would have lazily relied upon. There’s a dogged, difficult desperation to the characters, exploring the things we might do to convince ourselves and others that something is true.”

Premiering in the noncompetitive Cannes Premiere program last year, The Wave was inspired by a series of feminist protests and strikes that hit towns and cities all across Chile in 2018. Centering on Julia (Daniela López), a student and a recent victim of sexual assault, The Wave is “an ambitious spectacle,” wrote Lovia Gyarkye in the Hollywood Reporter, “with Lelio combining energetic songs and dance sequences with surrealist touches to tell a story of women’s empowerment. Aesthetic flourishes abound, which make it an entertaining viewing experience, but one does wish that the narrative was a touch more complex. Lelio embeds some compelling meta-textual moments—ones that mostly address that fact that he’s a man tackling this subject—but the actual story of Julia can feel secondary to the melodic pageantry.”

Remembering the director at RogerEbert.com, Carlos Aguilar writes that “the body of work that Lelio leaves behind speaks to a mind concerned with the opportunities people have to reclaim their power or rediscover themselves even if that means torching the status quo.”