Sebastián Lelio Remembered, Digi Mart USA News: The last 20 years have brought a remarkable flowering of creativity from Chilean filmmakers. The standard bearers of the Novísimo Cine Chileno, or New Chilean Cinema, include Pablo Larraín, Patricio Guzmán, who died this year, and Sebastián Silva.
They brought global audiences stories about life in Chile after submission to Augusto Pinochet’s rule, a tinpot tyranny that the United States encouraged and enabled as an alternative to communism.
Few directors have dramatized the different aspects of Chile’s complex and conflicted 21st-century zeitgeist as thoroughly as Sebastián Lelio. Some of his films were overtly political and some were not.
All were fierce, passionate and sensual, an expression of defiance against a system that robbed ordinary people of pleasure.
His 2013 film Gloria, starring the award-winning Chilean actor Paulina García, was remade in English in 2018 as Gloria Bell, starring Julianne Moore. The film follows a free-spirited divorcee searching singles bars for fun, sex, love and meaning.
She appears to find all four with an older gentleman, though their growing relationship is complicated by their grown children. The film was transplanted to the United States with little fuss, yet Lelio shows that its heroine belongs to a generation whose young adulthood was shaped by Pinochet’s rule.
Lelio’s 2017 film Disobedience, his English-language debut, starred Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. Set in a London conservative Jewish community, it follows Ronit, a rabbi’s daughter whose secret gay identity emerges after her father’s death under unbearable tension.
The film was made outside Lelio’s Latin American heartland, under gray British skies.
His later English-language film The Wonder, released in 2022, adapted Emma Donoghue’s novel. Florence Pugh plays an English nurse sent to a rural Irish community in 1862 to investigate a “wonder”: a young girl who has stopped eating yet appears perfectly healthy.
The film asks whether this is divine grace or a trick by a child who has sensed adults’ need to believe in miracles.
For many critics, Lelio’s masterpiece is A Fantastic Woman, or Una Mujer Fantástica, from 2017, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and shows the influence of Almodóvar. Daniela Vega plays Marina, a trans woman in a secret but happy relationship with an older divorcé.
When he dies, Marina is denied any chance to grieve or claim status as his partner, and the film follows her retreat into a hallucinatory dream state. Its operatic tragedy of grief, pain and quiet defiance connects with his Gloria films.
Lelio was a great humanist and a cinematic poet of ordinary lives.
