Sebastián Lelio was a fascinating film-maker of great passion and poetry

Chilean director of films including Gloria and A Fantastic Woman could expertly capture both the personal and political

Sebastián Lelio, director of A Fantastic Woman and Gloria, dies aged 52

The last 20 years have seen an amazing flowering of creativity from Chilean film-makers. The standard bearers of the Novisimo Cine Chileno, or New Chilean Cinema, have included Pablo Larraín, Patricio Guzmán (who sadly died this year) and Sebastián Silva, directors who brought to global audiences news of what it has been like in their country to have submitted to Augusto Pinochet’s rule, a tinpot tyranny encouraged and enabled by the United States as an acceptable alternative to communism. They were able to emerge from that rule into a kind of prosperous democratic normality in which their buried trauma and guilt still swirled around in their collective unconscious.

But there can hardly be a director who dramatized the different aspects of Chile’s complex and conflicted 21st-century zeitgeist than Sebastián Lelio. Some of his films were political and some not obviously political. But they were all fierce, passionate and sensual – an expression of defiance, at some level, against a system which robbed ordinary people of pleasure.

His 2013 film, Gloria, starring the award-winning Chilean actor Paulina García – which he remade in English in 2018 as Gloria Bell starring Julianne Moore – was a fascinating film, in a style not far from Cassavetes, about a free-spirited divorcee who is hanging out at singles bars, looking for fun, for sex, for love and for meaning. She seems to find all four with an older silver-fox gentleman whose burgeoning relationship with her looks like it’s getting stymied by their grownup children. On the surface, this doesn’t look much a political film about Chile and indeed it was transplanted away from its home country to the US without much fuss. But Lelio shows us that Gloria is of the generation whose entire young adulthood was overshadowed and poisoned by the Pinochet rule. Is it too late now for pleasure, for sensuality in the world of freedom that everyone else in the west has taken for granted?

Lelio’s 2017 film Disobedience, his English-language debut, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, was a London-set movie about a conservative Jewish community in which Weisz plays Ronit, a rabbi’s daughter whose secret gay identity flowers once her father is dead in circumstances of unbearable tension. It is a fascinating film, all the more intriguing perhaps in that it is happening outside Lelio’s Latin American heartland under gray British skies.

His later English-language film, The Wonder, from 2022, was a literary adaptation (from a novel by Emma Donoghue) which Lelio executed with exemplary skill: Florence Pugh stars as the English nurse who is called in to a rural Irish community in 1862 to investigate a miracle – a “wonder”. A young girl is no longer eating but appears perfectly healthy. Is this an example of divine grace, or a wicked trick, pulled off by a child who has intuited the grownup world’s pathetic need to believe in miracles?

For me, though, Lelio’s masterpiece is his quietly amazing film Una Mujer Fantástica, or A Fantastic Woman, from 2017 – which won the best international feature film Oscar, a film which incidentally shows the influence of Almodóvar. Transgender performer Daniela Vega plays Marina, a trans woman who is in a secret but perfectly happy relationship with an older man, a divorcee with a grownup son. When this man dies, Marina finds that she is denied any chance to grieve him or to claim any status as his partner: a cruel and trans-hostile world sets out to turn Marina into an unperson and the film tracks her retreat into a hallucinatory dream state. This is the operatic or soap-operatic tragedy of her grief and pain and quiet defiance, and it has an obvious connection with his Gloria and Gloria Bell movies. Lelio was a great humanist and a great cinematic poet of ordinary lives.