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Ema
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Pablo Larraín’s Ema is a film I was dreading. In the first months of its global circulation, I had read nothing but negative accounts of it. But it turned out to be among the best things I saw in 2020. Departing from both Larraín’s earlier, political work such as No (2012) and his impressive American biopic Jackie (2016), Ema has been touted as a “marriage of film and dance” in the mode of Wim Wenders’ Pina (2011) – and, indeed, its early scenes showcase this aspect, outlining the tense production of a new piece by the demanding troupe-leader, Gastón (Gael García Bernal, brilliantly playing here against his own star image). As it happens, the dance (and its accompanying music) is of a particularly modern, streetwise style: reggaeton. Larraín captures it vibrantly enough, but the film truly takes off once it transforms reggaeton into the dramatic stake that divides or unites its characters. The core of the story is Ema (the sensational Mariana Di Girolamo), on her way to ditching husband Gastón, but also pining for the young boy Polo (Cristián Suárez) whom they once adopted but later returned to an orphanage. Ema is the apotheosis of the unruly heroine that some call for today: driven, visionary, occasionally vicious, conflicted – basically, all over the shop. Let’s just say that when Ema gets a flamethrower in her hands, it’s an indelible spectacle. So the dance-showcase becomes a narrative. What I did not expect at all is that the narrative slowly reveals itself as an especially perverse kind of intimacy thriller – not with action sequences but spellbinding psychological and erotic power games (you’ll have to discover the substance of these for yourself). The pleasures of Ema are many, from the inspired use of the architecture of Valparaíso to the splendid scene in which Gastón bitterly demonstrates how reggaeton is, to him, like a “mechanical prison” – to which his fierce interlocutors protest that it is, in fact, “the orgasm you can dance”. © Adrian Martin August 2020 |
