A Fantastic Woman (dir. Sebastián Lelio, 2017) - The Sublime and the Body1

A Fantastic Woman, is an extraordinary film that won an Oscar in 2018 for the Best Foreign Film. It has been described by The Guardian as the ‘sublime study of love, loss and the trans-experience.’ⁱ In this review I want to note the focus on the body throughout the film, which then moves to the sublimation of the main character's anxiety and her sense of a profound loss after her lover dies. In the scene, which takes place towards the end of the film, the transgender woman Marina visits her elderly music teacher, clearly after a period of absence. He asks her why she has visited him. By this point the narrative of the film has taken the viewer through a range of emotions: from Marina losing her partner, through the humiliations and physical violence she has had to endure at the hands of her late lover's family and, finally, the moments of magical realism that help her come to terms with her loss. The everyday in this film is a site of mundane and ugly prejudice and small mindedness, which is not conducive to any moments of the sublime. But then the sublime does happen. The film is relentless in its painful representation of the discrimination and humiliation Marina suffers until we come to the scene of her visit to the elderly music teacher. The scene is shot in a traditional way consisting of a static camera shots, reverse shot, wide shots and mid shots. The camera emphasizes the ordinariness of the conversation. It could be a standard television drama. Its simple conversation is a crucial part of it precisely because out of this ordinary encounter something special emerges.

The teacher, who, in the structure of the scene occupies a position of Marina's father but also that of a psychoanalyst, tells her that she looks ‘terrible’ (and repeats it in case she missed it) and then interrogates her further: ‘Did you come here to work on your