Music Box Films releases the film in select theaters on Friday, August At least the identity of the firestarter is never in doubt. The details are fuzzy. A social worker speaks to Ema in a way that feels… unusually heated. In another montage, Larrain goes the full music video mile, with Ema and crew going through their paces around the city of Santiago; on docksides and rooftops, in warehouses, even on public transport.
Other cast members perform full-bloodedly and with with, notably Giannini, as a woman amazed to be venturing into sexual terra incognita. International sales: The Match Factory, info matchfactory. Screen International is the essential resource for the international film industry.
Subscribe now for monthly editions, awards season weeklies, access to the Screen International archive and supplements including Stars of Tomorrow and World of Locations. If we are able to extract anything from this, it's the understanding that building these impenetrable walls between herself and all of humanity is how Ema elects to deal with a horrible, traumatising event in her life that has made her feel guilty and resentful towards others, both emotions that she wishes to suppress.
That's not a lot of yield for the amount of work the movie asks us to do in order to get there. Even more recently, they returned him to the orphanage, after learning that he has a very definite psychopath-in-training streak, one that involves dead animals and fires, but not simultaneously.
And immediately after doing that , they were both struck with powerful feelings of their own guilt, and their loathing of each other. Whatever other limits I might find in the movie, this much is undeniable: Ema is a phenomenal dance movie, when it wants to be.
The dance sequences rip this apart, blowing the lid of the movie, as it were, by opening up in every direction, while the camera limbers itself up to approach the dance from different angles and distances. It's not quite the case that the camera moves with the dance, so much as that the presence of dancing seems to give the camera lease to free itself from the rigidity of the aesthetic elsewhere in the film.
And this is a fine way for the film to get at the matter of Ema's emotional closure, providing a stylistic way in to the feeling of the dance, since she will not otherwise be letting us have any access to those feelings. Great enough, but the problem is that there aren't nearly enough dance scenes in the film, and they're only giving us one angle into one aspect of Ema's personality. The rest of the film is nothing but those visual boxes, filled with stifled conversations and moment after moment of Ema letting the presence of other people glide around her without perturbing her surface in the least, remaining a profoundly unknowable, unreachable figure.
And it goes to other melodramatic places still, always while preserving the slightly glassy mood that it has established thus far. Ostensibly, Ema revels in the pulling down of walls, insistent on stripping away the artifice of civility and systemic conservatism. So, as Ema and Gaston try to move on from their trauma, Ema takes more and more drastic measures to feel out the limits of her control.
They both know how dangerous her self-discovery could be for those in her orbit. Hers is a body fundamentally opposed to stasis; reggaeton is her salvation. When she is only walking, her gestures look preternatural. She is the mother of this universe, and her energy will one day burn so brightly it will extinguish itself into nothing, taking everything with it. It can feel invigorating.
Necessary even.
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