A-Directed by Pablo Larrain Starring Mariana de Girolamo and Gael Garcia Bernal Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Early pandemic articles contained grabby headlines about the nuclear family not being enough to sustain a full life, especially when broader alternatives are ruled out by public health concerns. It’s been almost two years, and while I don’t think Pablo Larrain wrote those articles for Slate and similar publications, his boundary-breaking film Ema has the same sentiment. At least its protagonist shares the view that restricting the human heart (and genitals) to a small group of people is folly, and her task over the course of the film is to convince, or entrap, others to feel that same. Ema throbs with physical and sexual energy, part music video and part psychodrama and all the best work of Larrain’s unique career.
Mariana de Girolamo stars as Ema, a dancer in husband Gaston’s (Gael Garcia Bernal) avant garde company. With her slicked back silver hair on a lithe frame, Ema cuts a striking figure but is in a dying marriage. Thanks to her husband’s impotence and their desire to have a child, they’ve adopted a boy but, in a move that has made them both pariahs, had to return him to the adoption agency after young Polo (Christian Suarez) lit his aunt’s face on fire, to say nothing of the time he put the family cat in the freezer. Larrain isn’t making a Chilean We Need to Talk About Kevin, as Polo is viewed by all as a troubled child that Ema and Gaston were unable to help. The rift in their marriage, coupled with Ema’s crushing guilt, drives her away from Gaston’s formalized studio and into the streets with a reggaeton company, something Gaston views as a vulgar and useless form of music. Larrain plainly disagrees as the film repeatedly revels in Ema, alone or with her new friends, twerking and popping through the streets in fits of ecstatic horniness. The rest of Ema’s time is spent stalking Polo’s new family and worming her way into the husband’s good graces.
Larrain’s willingness to skip narrative and film these long MTV sequences is the same kind of formal break with tradition that Ema’s trying to achieve. She’s embarking on a pansexual odyssey and he’s documenting it in whatever style he damn well pleases. The reggaeton gang is so in command of their desires and their sexuality that it becomes frankly intimidating. They get their hands on a flamethrower at some point and they love shooting ‘hot dinosaur cum’ to achieve posterized shots of themselves. Both character and director are burning it all down. That De Giroloma is so skilled and Larrain’s camera knows how to make her and her friends look as cool as possible turns Ema into a sensory feast, such that the story takes away from the dance interludes as opposed to the other way around.
Despite taking a backseat to Larrain’s flights of fancy, the story’s pretty great, too. Real-life stories about adoption abandonment draw media attention, and the rawness and shame of it guarantee that it’ll keep happening whenever the clicks are taking a dive. Nothing makes people turn their heads like women behaving badly, and taking a formal pass on motherhood is about as bad as a woman can behave in many circles. Ema and Gaston take a verbal beatdown from a furious social worker, and they have nothing to say in response to her. Ema’s reaction to a particular line about how the social worker knew they couldn’t do this alone is one of acceptance and acknowledgement, and there’s one solution to her problem in her mind. Once she’s become a gender outcast, other forms of female sin become undifferentiated. She already did the worst thing she could do, so who cares if she starts doing the fourth-worst?
Ema’s orgiastic bombast makes it an incredibly fun film to watch, not quite a musical but loaded with excellent tracks and choreography. Larrain’s Chilean films like Neruda and The Club have usually left me cold, but when hot dinosaur cum is blasting towards the camera, cold is not the adjective one would use. A-
Larrain’s willingness to skip narrative and film these long MTV sequences is the same kind of formal break with tradition that Ema’s trying to achieve. She’s embarking on a pansexual odyssey and he’s documenting it in whatever style he damn well pleases. The reggaeton gang is so in command of their desires and their sexuality that it becomes frankly intimidating. They get their hands on a flamethrower at some point and they love shooting ‘hot dinosaur cum’ to achieve posterized shots of themselves. Both character and director are burning it all down. That De Giroloma is so skilled and Larrain’s camera knows how to make her and her friends look as cool as possible turns Ema into a sensory feast, such that the story takes away from the dance interludes as opposed to the other way around.
Despite taking a backseat to Larrain’s flights of fancy, the story’s pretty great, too. Real-life stories about adoption abandonment draw media attention, and the rawness and shame of it guarantee that it’ll keep happening whenever the clicks are taking a dive. Nothing makes people turn their heads like women behaving badly, and taking a formal pass on motherhood is about as bad as a woman can behave in many circles. Ema and Gaston take a verbal beatdown from a furious social worker, and they have nothing to say in response to her. Ema’s reaction to a particular line about how the social worker knew they couldn’t do this alone is one of acceptance and acknowledgement, and there’s one solution to her problem in her mind. Once she’s become a gender outcast, other forms of female sin become undifferentiated. She already did the worst thing she could do, so who cares if she starts doing the fourth-worst?
Ema’s orgiastic bombast makes it an incredibly fun film to watch, not quite a musical but loaded with excellent tracks and choreography. Larrain’s Chilean films like Neruda and The Club have usually left me cold, but when hot dinosaur cum is blasting towards the camera, cold is not the adjective one would use. A-
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