Ema – first look review

Chilean direc­tor Pablo Lar­raín made a name for him­self with his dark alle­gor­i­cal dra­mas on the dev­as­tat­ing his­to­ry of his home­land and the lega­cy of polit­i­cal dic­ta­tor­ship. He was reward­ed with a trip to Hol­ly­wood where he deliv­ered the divi­sive Jack­ie, star­ring Natal­ie Port­man as America’s most famous wid­ow, Jack­ie Onas­sis. He returns with some­thing com­plete­ly fresh and chal­leng­ing, a cool­ly abstract vision of the mod­ern fam­i­ly that pays sub­tle lip ser­vice to the film noir tradition.

And as our femme fatale is Mar­i­ana Di Girolamo’s Ema, a job­bing reg­gae­ton dancer with a shock of sil­ver hair swept over her skull and two giant, glassy eyes that give absolute­ly noth­ing away. She deliv­ers a phe­nom­e­nal­ly con­trolled per­for­mance, one where expres­sive detail is a very hard cur­ren­cy that’s not to be wast­ed. Part of its plea­sure is that this is a turn to be savoured both in the moment and after the cred­its have rolled – it’s so hard to com­pre­hend the num­ber of inte­ri­or plates she’s spin­ning in terms of pro­ject­ing and with­hold­ing infor­ma­tion, that the mar­vel only becomes appar­ent in hindsight.

Ema is mar­ried to her dance instruc­tor Gas­ton (Gael Gar­cía Bernal), a nervy, slight­ly anti­so­cial type who only wears dun­ga­rees and seethes with a bar­ley-con­cealed rage. We join them at a point in their bro­ken rela­tion­ship where they are in a depres­sive funk, due to the fact that their adopt­ed six-year-old son, Polo, has been sent back to social ser­vices and placed with anoth­er fam­i­ly. Ema retains a secret con­nec­tion to the boy, and the inten­si­ty of that con­nec­tion is the film’s big ques­tion. She appears to pin-ball through life, meet­ing var­i­ous peo­ple and insist­ing on an emo­tion­al close­ness that belies her rela­tion­ship to them. It’s all or noth­ing with Ema, but you have to sit very tight for her motives to become clear.

In a way, you might see Ema as the cool and impul­sive teen sis­ter to Jack­ie, as both films are con­cerned with young women forced to deal with a sud­den fam­i­ly trau­ma, or the absence of some­one close to them who they nev­er real­ly knew. Yet this film is loos­er and more play­ful, work­ing hard to keep you on your toes and guess­ing from where the next big plot swerve might come. Lar­raín keeps con­text dain­ti­ly light, so, for instance, we have the occa­sion­al sequence where Ema wan­ders the land­scape with a giant, mil­i­tary flamethrow­er, torch­ing traf­fic lights, waste bins and cars in homage to the pint-sized pyro­ma­ni­ac Polo, who burned down their house.

The film’s frag­men­tary nar­ra­tive can often make for tough view­ing, and the wait for some kind of basic cohe­sion is per­haps a lit­tle longer that some may be com­fort­able with. But that’s not to dis­cred­it Larraín’s won­der­ful­ly slow­burn con­ceit, which deliv­ers in show­man-like fash­ion when the mov­ing final reel arrives. There are also stylised digres­sions beat-matched to Nico­las Jaar’s puls­ing, ambi­ent score – one is a breath­tak­ing visu­al mosa­ic of Di Girolamo’s street danc­ing prowess in which each cut brings with it a new, eye-pop­ping cos­tume change.

It’s maybe Larraín’s most hope­ful film, even though it tra­vers­es some rocky the­mat­ic ter­rain and gen­tly nee­dles at the con­ser­v­a­tive con­struct of the per­fect fam­i­ly. It’s sul­try and mys­te­ri­ous, but also comes with a strain of caus­ti­cal­ly iron­ic humour, per­haps best show­cased in a dys­pep­tic mono­logue deliv­ered by Bernal in which he states how he real­ly feels about Ema sul­ly­ing the good name of mod­ern dance with her pop­ulist dis­plays on the local bas­ket­ball court. All in all, it’s an enig­mat­ic film worth tan­gling with as the even­tu­al pay-off is significant.