The Chilean filmmaker, who passed away on Friday aged 52, leaves behind a diverse but cohesive body of work including 'Gloria,' 'The Wonder' and the Oscar-winning 'A Fantastic Woman.'
When it was announced, in 2017, that the Chilean writer-director Sébastian Lelio was to helm a U.S. remake of his 2013 breakout film “Gloria,” admirers of the original — and indeed of Lelio himself — had cause for concern. English-language do-overs of world cinema successes frequently go awry; furthermore, we had the cautionary tale of Dutchman George Sluizer, who directed a hopeless 1993 remake of his own impeccable 1988 chiller “The Vanishing,” to remind us that even having the original filmmaker in charge was no guarantee against a travesty.
The news came at a crucial moment in Lelio’s career. The first of his two films to premiere in 2017, the vibrant, heartfelt transgender character study “A Fantastic Woman,” was riding a wave of festival and critical success that began with a Best Screenplay win at the Berlinale, and culminated with an Oscar for Best International Feature (or Best Foreign Language Film, as the award was still called then) — the first ever win for a Chilean film in the category, sealing a resurgence of the country’s cinema also being led by such contemporaries as Sebastián Silva and Lelio’s own producer Pablo Larraín.
The second, “Disobedience,” was Lelio’s English-language debut — another story of queer identity, but an altogether different tonal and stylistic proposition. A sober portrayal of an illicit romance between two women from North London’s strict Orthodox Jewish community, it was sensitively observed and beautifully acted by leads Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, with a restraint that was occasionally countered by moments of frank, charged sensuality. The contrast between “A Fantastic Woman” and “Disobedience” confirmed Lelio as a particularly empathetic and versatile teller of women’s stories — and “Gloria,” a warm and unsentimentally joyous comedy of a fiftysomething divorcée’s reawakening, was also good one. But why go back, when his career was barreling forward?
As it turned out, Lelio knew better than his doubters. The remake, which eventually premiered in 2019 as “Gloria Bell,” hewed close to the template of the original, largely inheriting its pleasures and poignancies. But if that makes it sound redundant, it proved a canny and fascinating exercise in performer-as-auteur influence: It was clear that Lelio, self-evidently a champion of women on screen, was interested to see how a wholly different actress would change the tone and temperature of his original story.
A lot, we learned. Paulina García was a funny and resilient force of nature in the 2013 original; in “Gloria Bell,” Julianne Moore brought a yearning, lonely fragility to the material that gave even the film’s uplifting trajectory an undertow of melancholy. The remake got less than its due — Moore, at the very least, deserved some awards attention that year — but it sits beside “Gloria” as an illuminating companion piece rather than a competing interpretation.
I lead with the two Glorias because their respective successes improbably prove a truth about Lelio, a restlessly curious and compassionate filmmaker who passed away, far too soon, on Friday, aged just 52: Even when ostensibly making the same film twice, he never made the same film twice.
His 2005 debut “The Sacred Family” was confident and a bit scrappy, its handheld jaggedness far removed from his later polish, its droll comic tale of a bourgeois man falling for his son’s girlfriend also distinct from the searching feminist portraiture that would define his later career. But it was lively and promising, made in a semi-improvised fashion that he carried forward into his next, more complex film, the troubled youth study “Navidad,” which made its way into the 2009 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight program. But his third film, 2011’s “The Year of the Tiger,” was a considerably more sophisticated effort: an exquisitely understated exploration of faith, guilt and trauma in the wake of Chile’s devastating 2010 earthquake.
“The Year of the Tiger,” which competed at Locarno, was too soulful and richly considered a work on its own terms to be seen as a bid for arthouse-major status — but that’s how it worked out anyway, even if the film didn’t get quite the global exposure it deserved. But by the time “Gloria” came along two years later, the word on Lelio was out and expectations were high: The film was selected for the main competition at Berlin and was an immediate, ebulliently received crowdpleaser. If Larraín had established himself as the dark prince of new Chilean cinema with spiky, perverse, politically bristling works like “Post Mortem” and “No,” Lelio was poised to become its great humanist: his touch light but not soft, his perspective probing but not abrasive.
“A Fantastic Woman,” four years later, delivered on that promise. Propelled by trans star Daniela Vega’s extraordinary, emotionally unguarded performance, its story of a grieving trans woman spurned by the prejudiced family of her dead lover arrived at a vital tipping point for the visibility of transgender narratives and artists in popular culture, and delicately essayed an arc of emphatic, even triumphant self-definition amid a climate of isolation and rejection — all without feeling glibly or opportunistically issue-driven. It was to Lelio’s credit that he was fairly self-effacing in his promotion of the film, letting Vega — with whom he had closely developed the protagonist, aligned with her experience — be its chief ambassador and spokesperson.
“A Fantastic Woman” earned Lelio the most acclaim and kudos of his career — though his finest film as a director, to my mind, was comparatively shortchanged. A period drama set in 19th-century Ireland and adapted from a novel by “Room” author Emma Donoghue, “The Wonder” didn’t outwardly look or feel much like a Lelio joint — with its austerely repressed milieu shot, by Ari Wegner, with such a damp, chilly verdigris finish you could practically sense moss growing on the screen as you watched. Yet its story of feminine resolve and dueling moral and spiritual convictions meshed well with the director’s interests, as did Florence Pugh’s tenacious, stout-hearted performance; the film’s earthy folktale trappings stood in exciting contrast to its stark formalist construction.
If “The Wonder” was an ambitious and grandly realized reach, I was less sold on the huge stylistic swing of Lelio’s most recent film, last year’s political musical “The Wave,” which returned him to his homeland. Inspired by a national spate of #MeToo-related feminist student protests that shut down universities across Chile in 2018, it was rhetorically heavy-handed but composed and choreographed with dynamic aplomb, positively thrilling to the spectacle of massed bodies in motion: I wrote in my review that it made one eager to see Lelio tackle more musical fare on screen, never thinking that the film would be his last.
In one of “The Wave’s” more playful flourishes, the fourth wall is broken to acknowledge Lelio’s own presence as the director of the movie — and to ask, pointedly, what a male director was doing on this expressly feminist project anyway. It’s a wink-wink joke that more seriously encapsulated the generous, conscientious, community-minded approach that Lelio brought to his filmmaking: His auteur signature was subtly distinctive, yet he never made himself the star of his work.
