Everything about Ema seems specifically designed to keep us at a distance from its troubled and troubling protagonist. Ema (Mariana Di Girólamo) is stubborn, selfish and self-destructive in all the ways that have made her a terrible adoptive mother to a son who inherited a lot of the same qualities. She adopted the boy with Gastón (Gael García Bernal), an older man who likes to remind his wife of her failings as a parent. This is a deeply unhappy relationship for reasons we understand entirely too well, mostly through shouting matches written and performed with a theatricality meant to remind us just how bad things are between these two.
The boy launched a merciless and cruel attack upon an innocent woman, leaving her in the hospital for weeks on end, half her face appearing melted from a chemical burn. Now, whether the government has taken him or some other intervention has occurred to remove the boy from Ema’s care, the resounding feeling we get is of agreeing with that decision. This puts the audience at a curious sympathetic disadvantage with this story, written by Guillermo Calderón, Alejandro Moreno and director Pablo Larraín. Perhaps as told by Gastón, played by Bernal with a palpable sense of emotional defeatism, the story might be one of genuine tragedy, as the grip of the story slowly closes in on our throats.
Larraín does fashion the story with the aesthetic of both a thriller, in that the pace is kept at boiling point at all times (as if Ema is ready to explode at any moment), and, curiously, a dance musical, featuring sequences of precisely choreographed movement and one impressive montage of Ema and her dance troupe moving throughout various landmarks of their city. These elements are gorgeously crafted by Larraín, cinematographer Sergio Armstrong and, in the case of the dance sequences, choreographer Jose Luís Vidal. Obviously, such elements are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore in a movie that wishes to employ them in such a way to grab us aesthetically.
The problem, then, is in the fumbled attempt at a genuine exploration of Ema as a character. There is nothing here to access, either through Di Girolamo’s studied but stoic performance or in the way the screenwriters have heaped suffering upon Ema or from her onto other characters. She schemes and scams her way into the lives of the people who might be able to help her win back her son, from firefighter Aníbal (Santiago Cabrera) — after she sets a friend’s car on fire, with the help of a flamethrower, to get his attention — to social worker Raquel (Paola Giannini, guarded before revealing layers in a very good performance), whom she seduces in order to divorce Gastón.
The film’s initially unique rhythms settle into something approaching formula as Ema dances, and fights with Gastón, and has sex with Aníbal and Raquel and a number of female friends, and sets something on fire, and looks for yet more ways to reunite with her son. Eventually, though, it becomes a tiresome, borderline-worrisome prospect to follow this woman’s journey toward reclaiming parenthood for herself and no one else. The final sequences with each character hold some power, from how Gastón ends as almost completely emasculated and Raquel realizes two truths about the woman with whom she has been involved; but in finding honesty about its main character, Ema loses itself in excess.
The post Ema appeared first on Spectrum Culture.