Chilean director Sebastian Lelio has a new film which has been taking the Berlin Film Festival by storm.

While the film did not win the Golden Bear, Sebastián Lelio and Gonzalo Maza won the best screenplay award for Lelio’s Chilean drama “A Fantastic Woman,” about a woman dealing with the loss of her older, married lover. And the film won the Teddy Award for best LGBT film.

Everything in the film’s opening beats is fashioned as a fine bone in the skeleton of a mystery, as divorced 57-year-old Orlando (Francisco Reyes) is introduced frequenting a shadowed sauna in downtown Santiago, later searching in vain for some missing, crucial paperwork, before meeting his glamorous, far younger girlfriend, bar singer Marina (the remarkable trans actress Daniela Vega), for a birthday dinner. That evening, Orlando suffers a fatal aneurysm out of the blue, sustaining grievous bodily injuries as he tumbles down the stairs; once Marina notifies Orlando’s brother Gapo (Luis Gnecco) that he died on the operating table, she makes a panicked dash from the hospital, high heels clacking into the city’s sodium-lit night before the police give chase. We soon learn, however, that all this genre-implying cloak-and-dagger has been but a lithe directorial red herring, indicating nothing more than the unjustified suspicion with which Marina is viewed by others.

She may look fierce in oversized shades and a tight leather pencil skirt, but Marina is no femme fatale: Nothing about her identity or her relationship to the deceased is disreputable or disingenuous. Yet as she struggles to keep a lid on her own lacerating grief, she finds herself treated as an impostor: by the immediate respondents at the hospital, who insist on addressing her by her birth ID; by a female detective (Amparo Noguera) from the senselessly enlisted Sexual Offenses Investigation Unit, who subjects her to a humiliating physical inspection; and finally by Orlando’s own family and ex-wife Sonia (a chilling, corrosive Aline Kuppenheim), who claims primary mourning rights and labels Marina a “chimera” to her face. Barred from the wake and funeral, with almost no one willing to hear her own emotional turmoil, Marina must forge an independent way to say goodbye and start anew.

Among its manifold virtues, “A Fantastic Woman” will be most vigorously embraced by factions of the LGBTQ community for its trans-as-trans casting — a detail which many recent works on this growingly prominent social issue, including “The Danish Girl” and TV’s “Transparent,” have taken flak for sidestepping. Yet Vega’s tough, expressive, subtly anguished performance deserves so much more than political praise. It’s a multi-layered, emotionally polymorphous feat of acting, nurtured with pitch-perfect sensitivity by her director, who maintains complete candor on Marina’s condition without pushing her anywhere she wouldn’t herself go. At one point in her mortifying police examination, a photographer demands that she drop the towel from her waist. She reluctantly complies, yet the camera respectfully feels no need to lower it gaze: “A Fantastic Woman” is no less assured than its heroine of her hard-won identity.

--Guy Lodge, Variety