Gloria’s body sways to the music. She’s taken off her glasses and mustered the courage to step into the dance floor. What begins as a succession of shy, awkward moves soon becomes a spontaneous celebration of autonomy for a middled-aged woman coming into her own at long last. Her outburst of self-assurance, ignoring what the world might think of her, illustrates a transformation. She’s been pushed around long enough. That’s over now.
Such determination to defend one’s dignity is also present in the rage that a trans woman displays when stumping on the car of the people who’ve dehumanized her for falling in love. And it’s in the incandescent desire that pushes an Orthodox Jewish wife to defy her dogma and surrender to an “illicit” kiss. It’s through these moments of transgression that Sebastián Lelio, the lauded Chilean filmmaker who died on Friday at age 52, molded many of his characters into relatable, yet heroic figures confronting intimate human battles.
Lelio secured his place in the history of Chilean cinema earning the country’s first-ever Oscar for Best International Feature Film for the terrific drama “A Fantastic Woman,” a trophy he received from Rita Moreno’s hands in 2018. Accolades aside, 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.
Before breaking through internationally with 2013’s “Gloria,” the bittersweet portrait of the aforementioned woman dancing at the end of her ordeal, Lelio had already directed three features. Those early works mapped the course for an artist interested in questioning ingrained belief systems not through a theoretical, emotionally removed lens but by creating fictions grappling with how ideological conflicts impact everyday people.
His 2005 debut, “The Sacred Family” (La sagrada familia) observed the hypocrisy of a staunchly Catholic household up-close when a young woman visits her boyfriend’s family. Her presence unsettles the seemingly ideal family dynamic.
Lelio’s sophomore effort, 2009’s “Christmas” (Navidad), again looked at how an individual’s personal discovery upends previously held notions about how things should be. This time he followed a teenage couple whose holiday trip turns tense when one of the partners decides to explore their sexuality. And, as it’s often the case in his films, a new element entering the picture—here is another young woman—challenges the reality that the characters had constructed for themselves.
For 2011’s “The Year of the Tiger,” Lelio departed from the aftermath of the destructive 2010 earthquake in Chile to build a character study on Manuel (Luis Dubó), an incarcerated man who takes advantage of the chaos to escape prison. He reenters society and looks for his family amid the ruins. But while he’s regained his freedom, he doesn’t feel particularly unburdened. Lelio (with screenwriter Gonzalo Maza, a key longtime collaborator) brilliantly coalesced the backdrop of what was happening in his country with the conflicted psyche of a man whose new circumstances force him to reassess his past choices.
Then came “Gloria,” where actress Paulina García delivers a luminous, often hilarious lead performance, Lelio tapped into a more lighthearted, but not for that less insightful vein. The eponymous, divorced heroine allows herself a chance to date again only to face deceit from her new lover. The upsetting situation enables Gloria to reconnect with her mischievous, more playful side, ultimately finding peace in moving forward on her own.
Unlike most filmmakers working outside of the U.S. with a movie that makes waves internationally, Lelio had the opportunity to adapt his “Gloria” into the English-language “Gloria Bell” (2018) with Julianne Moore in the title role. Even more surprising and rare is that the essence of what made the original so deliciously amusing remained intact in translation.
Of course, it’s “A Fantastic Woman” and its success and subsequent impact that have led most headlines about Lelio’s passing—and with good reason. For his story about Marina, a trans woman and opera singer harassed by the family of her deceased romantic parter, Lelio found Daniela Vega, an acting revelation that imbued the character with a striking inner fortitude as she pushes against the grain of those who refuse to acknowledge her identity. In “A Fantastic Woman,” Lelio plays with genre, at times including whimsical flourishes that expand the viewer’s perception of who Marina is beyond her difficulties.
The attention that “A Fantastic Woman” garnered around the world played a significant role in Chile finally passing a bill that allowed transgender people to legally change their identity. It was following the film’s Oscar win and Vega becoming the first openly transgender person to present at the Academy Awards that the then Chilean president Michelle Bachele urged lawmakers to legislate in favor of trans individuals. In September of 2018, just months after Lelio held the Oscar, Chile’s Gender Identity Law finally passed.
During a 2018 interview I did with him about “A Fantastic Woman” for MovieMaker Magazine, Lelio entertained the idea that Gloria and Marina, the protagonists of his best-known films could someday meet in Santiago. Inside his multiverse, they would get along, he thought.
“I’ve actually thought about it a lot. Daniela and I spend a lot of time playing around to invent that story. We have a lot of different beginnings for that story. One of them is that Marina is at the bank trying to cash a check and the attendant discriminates her because her ID has a different name. This is because in Chile she can’t legally change her identity. Gloria is in line at the bank as well, and she defends Marina,” he said. “That’s the beginning of a story that we don’t know where it ends. Creating versions of the story is a game Daniela and I have been playing all year. It’s like making a movie in the Marvel universe. Putting together [Marina] and Gloria would be like putting together Wonder Woman and Iron Man.”
When Lelio crossed over to English-language filmmaking with 2017’s “Disobedience,” an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel, his sensibilities didn’t change. His rebellious characters now were Ronit (Rachel Weisz) and Esti (Rachel McAdams) women raised in London’s Orthodox Jewish community who reconnect as adults when Ronit returns for a funeral. Their encounter reignites old feelings for each other forbidden by their faith.
“It’s about the human right to disobedience,” Lelio told me about the forbidden romance during an interview for Little White Lies in 2018. “In order for something to change or for progress to happen, someone has to disobey the rules at some point.” That indeed reads like the mantra that many of the characters he conjured up for the screen. The men and mostly women he enshrined act as catalysts to reveal the rigidness of those around them.
The same can be said about 2022’s “The Wonder,” his last English-language adapted from Emma Donoghue’s book, where Florence Pugh plays a 19th century nurse caring for a young Irish girl who’s been fasting for months. That she still alive is seen like a possible miracle by most; it’s only the skepticism of Pugh’s character that can save the girl’s life. One more time, pushing back against accepted ideas held as unquestionable truths is the motor that connects Lelio’s films across languages and geographical latitudes.
Lelio’s last completed project, “The Wave” (La ola) debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and though reviews were mixed, the narrative aligned with the rest of his filmography. A fiery musical dealing with Chile’s feminist movement from the perspective of a student who becomes the tip of the spear in the collective fight. Before his death, Lelio was already working on a new film, “Poeta chileno,” an adaptation of his compatriot Alejandro Zambra’s novel, about an unconventional bond between a man and his stepson forged via poetry.
“When you are in a crisis what destroys you deep inside is that you need to be able to disobey that which you thought was real, what you thought was love, who you thought you were,” he eloquently said in our Little White Lies interview. “There is violence and pain in that process, but it also brings about the seed of a new freedom.”
