Ema, Pablo Larraín’s latest movie, is pretty to look at, but it isn’t much more than an attractive aesthetic object — an unwieldy genre grab bag where nothing works besides the presentation. It’s formed around the chaos agent slash dancer character of the title (Mariana Di Girolamo); it isn’t so much a character study as it is an unpredictable look at the ramifications of her literal and figurative compulsion to start fires.
The first thing we see in Ema is a shot of this perennial troublemaker looking placidly at the stoplight she has just torched with a rented flamethrower. No one tells this woman what to do! the symbolic gesture screams at us. After that, the film moves into the main narrative, itself sparked by a figurative blaze. Ema and her older choreographer husband, Gastón (Gael García Bernal), have controversially decided to give up the 10-year-old boy they adopted 10 months ago. Ema simply couldn’t handle that the kid, Polo, picked up her arsonist tendencies, which climaxed recently when he set her sister’s sleeping face aflame.
The initial adoption was in the first place a ploy by the couple to save their going-downhill relationship — Gastón’s infertility problems have spawned enough resentment for Ema to at a certain point in the movie call him a “human condom.” So the move to pass Polo off, spearheaded presumably by Ema, only puts more pressure on the crevices that had been weakening this union nearly a year ago. Ema and Gastón henceforth become bad guys in their community, too. Ema is particularly despised by her colleagues at the school where she works, Gastón by the dance troupe. She’s fired, he’s progressively ostracized. (Ema is also part of the troupe, but most of the similarly solipsistic people on it that we meet are unyieldingly faithful friends of hers.)
This strange and melodramatic plot keeps spiraling. Ema, who’s been thinking about separating from Gastón, does some digging and finds out that Polo’s new adoptive parents are a divorce lawyer (Paola Giannini) and a firefighter (Santiago Cabrera). Not disclosing her connection to Polo, she hires the lawyer to assist with divorce proceedings. Then she starts an affair with her seemingly so that she can get her services free. (Dancing, after all, isn’t usually lucrative.) But when Ema also starts something with the firefighter, you know she has something more up her sleeve than mere cost-cutting. Perhaps misguided revenge? “I’m evil,” Ema warns the man before sleeping with him the first time. He nervously laughs, thinking this is just some overwrought self-deprecation; he keeps laughing when Ema adds that he will be “horrified” when he discovers just why she has taken an interest in him. We, in contrast, are very nervous. When a minor character comments late in the movie that “artists are intense,” it hits us like an understatement, and also maybe too soft a descriptor for the explosive Ema.
The hand-over-mouth-surprising ending proves that Ema was hardly kidding — in fact she was giving a fair warning — when she was cautioning her firefighter lover with that self-flagellating bluntness. It also proves that Ema is not as thoughtlessly reckless as we at first think she is. Actually, what appears to us as a lifelong addiction to breeding anarchy — though a kind that always ensures she’s its puppet master — is about as carefully considered as the decision-making you’d see from someone traditionally level-headed recruiting a financial adviser to help them make smart investments. Ema is thrilled by insecurity; there is some explanation for that late in the movie that isn’t very convincing and is all we get contextually for the character’s unique brand of destruction.
Some of these descriptions might make Ema sound like soapy fun — 100 or so minutes of artful trashiness. But the only fun it really contains are in its amalgam of flashy images: a fleet of white-clad dancers clad pulsing in front of a glowing red orb; a blue-doused sex marathon; Ema dancing on the beach like a woman possessed; Ema smoldering with supermodel aplomb on various rides, alone, at a kaleidoscopically colored local carnival. The character herself is a visual jolt: slicked-back white-blonde hair; ugly-chic street clothes; and gaudy piercings, one of which unforgettably includes what looks like a mini javelin thrust into its right-earlobe target.
You can’t fully relish in these images because everything else about the movie is a wearingly overconstructed tribute to rebellion. There isn’t any real-feeling passion undergirding them. The pathos at the center of the drama feels fake; we don’t care about any of the characters because they don’t strike us like people. Ema’s devotion to her art isn’t explored. Even if it wasn’t, Ema feels overly crafted around an image. It’s like the screenwriters had a provocative vision of a punkish woman with severe hair starting fires and half-heartedly built a movie around her purely because they wanted to touch her rather than stay haunted by a misty mirage.
Di Girolamo has gotten a lot of good notices for her performance, but she never does anything particularly special. The noisy clothes and jewelry are doing more than she is — they wear her more than she wears them. The best thing about the movie is instead the always-great Bernal, who uncovers real emotion (and looks good with his hair shorn in this faded hipster style) in a role that is, like all the other ones in Ema, still hollow. (I’m not happy to report any of this — I’ve been wanting to see the movie, just now getting a meaningful release stateside, since it initially premiered more than two years ago at the Venice Film Festival.)
Sandwiched between 2016’s Jackie, a glacial character study about a freshly widowed Mrs. Kennedy, and the upcoming Princess Diana-centered Spencer, Ema is apparently the weird middle sister in a Larraín-directed trilogy about magnetic women grappling with the pressures of societal and domestic expectation. Whereas Jackie and Spencer show their subjects trapped inside shielded, plush worlds, twitching beneath the oppressiveness of their respective environments, Ema has its woman lead working boldly to maintain control by swatting away upper hands that aren’t hers, oftentimes literally setting fire to anything perceived as a threat to her radical commitment to autonomy.
For many viewers, Larraín’s use of punch-to-the-face color will call to mind the coloring-book-bright movies of Pedro Almódovar. You can picture Ema potentially working if it also applied some of Almodóvar’s storytelling technique to its own narrative, which is to say present something outrageous but find the humor in the outrageousness. Ema’s narrative is objectively melodramatic, but it’s a hairless kind of melodrama. It’s narratively unhinged, and the film looks unhinged, too, but no one is having any fun with it. Ema strives for an exuberance it’s too aloof to pull off. It’s a movie equivalent of a person who tells you that they’re free-spirited, perhaps a little wild, but, the more you get to know them, seems to be a little uncomfortable with being wholly untamed so appears from then on to be feigning this self-descriptor to keep up appearances. Ema is a fashion-magazine spread’s idea of brashness. It’s a lot of visually nice but ultimately bloodless gesturing.
Gael García Bernal in No.
SINCE LOOKING AT ITS PRODUCTION STILLS is more enjoyable and less time-consuming, I wouldn’t recommend seeking out Ema. But I would recommend Bernal and Larraín’s other, earlier collaboration, which debuted nearly 10 years ago and in contrast to Ema coheres beautifully. No (2012) dramatizes the events leading up to a key transitional milestone in Chilean history. In 1988, the public voted on whether to extend by eight years or fully end Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which began in 1973 and was only eligible for a referendum because of international scrutiny. The vote, ultimately, was “no.” This unexpected majority-stance was preceded by a several-week late-night TV campaign in which teams on the “no” and “yes” camps were allotted 15 minutes each to argue their sides.
No homes in on the stressful efforts by the “no” group to make its case. It’s a challenge, to be sure. How do you sway the unconvinced — which also shouldn’t be treated monolithically if you want to get anywhere — while ensuring you’re not trivializing the very real harms of the dictatorship? “No”’s protagonist is René Saavedra (Bernal), a young advertising wiz who enjoys the challenge of this extremely difficult task perhaps more than he has deep-seated political convictions. Saavedra knows the power of a jingle, and he knows how to create eye-catching images. So he approaches the “no” ad work the way a songwriter might refine an earworm. Although initially pushed back on by some of his more austere older co-workers, it’s a tactic that proves a genius move.
Shot with Sony U-matic magnetic tape to visually embody the texture of its decade’s TV news spots, No almost effortlessly encapsulates its stakes’ seriousness while also letting everyday humor trickle in in a way that is only further persuasive to recreating its time and place. (The film’s visual style also reminds us how mundane history-making can look and feel on a minute-by-minute basis.) Like Ema, No contains a strong performance from Bernal and a mesmeric visual style, though has a heartfulness and vigor the newer film lacks. Next on Larraín’s docket is that project about Princess Di, to be played by American actress Kristen Stewart. Here’s to hoping it has even a fraction of No’s fervor and not a hint of Ema’s debilitating self-consciousness.
Peterson Reviews 