EMA: FILM REVIEW
The tone of Pablo Larraín’s Ema is derived from its opening shot, which idly shows a traffic light being engulfed in flames. The camera pans out to reveal the perpetrator — a woman who stands observantly on an empty street with a flamethrower across her back. Ema pulses with the wicked heat of fire and flames, coupled with an eclectic unpredictability that leaves the viewer addicted.
Ema revolves around the film’s protagonist, Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), a young and vibrant Chilean dancer who makes decisions entirely based on her own volition. She is married to Gastón (Gael García Bernal), the director of her dance company. Although he plays a prominent role in Ema’s life, the film ensures its focus never strays far from its protagonist. Ema trails Ema’s every move — studying them closely without placing the viewer too comfortably in her shoes.
Ema and Gastón are passionate lovers who have hit a point of intense conflict which cannot help but bubble to the surface of their relationship, no matter how much they try to subside it. The two adopted a boy named Polo, but after a series of unfortunate incidents (one of them involving setting half of Ema’s sister’s face on fire), they decide to give their son back to the orphanage. Both Ema and Gastón project their guilt onto each other, destroying each other in the process. The decision haunts their every move, and the whole community knows about it. Ema is alienated from the school she teaches at and where Polo used to attend. Gastón faces constant pushback from his dancers.
Much of Ema identifies the ways that Ema’s guilt eats at her like a parasite. She throws herself into various sexual affairs, begins to dance intensely to Reggaeton music, and even manages to get a hold of a flamethrower. From the naked eye, it might appear that Ema is swimming in a downward spiral. However, the film also pointedly argues that Ema grows into herself — breaking through constraints that only served to pin her down. Although her marriage is in shambles and Polo remains out of her possession, Ema feels free — much more so than at the beginning of the film. The physicality of sex and dancing are expressions of both Ema’s pain and acute awareness of her mortality.
Cinematically, Ema is mesmerizing. Radiating flames and glowing lights swallow the film’s every frame, but Ema herself remains the subject. She is simultaneously a prop and the object of everyone’s desire. She roars with her bleached-blonde hair and wears her sheer, leopard-print shirt like it is her skin. When Ema and her friends crowd a local bar and sit face-to-face with its hungered bartender, Ema stares him dead in the eye and asks which one of them is the prettiest. His eyes cannot divert from her innocuous glaze; the answer is always Ema.
Ema’s Ema is one of this year’s strongest characters, as she sets fire to the part of ourselves we wish we had the courage to ignite. Its plot is intensely driven by not only its characters, but the expression of art, rhythm, and moving one’s body. The film’s aim is not for viewers to understand Ema by the end, but rather to observe someone who is mourning a lost piece of themselves — and to do it in a way that is not depressive or even maddening. Instead, Ema lavishes in painting a portrait of a woman who barrels forward with ferocious strength — even if it requires setting a few things on fire along the way.