Night; crackling embers fall from a traffic sign set ablaze. A blonde woman with a blow torch stands admiring her work as the fire’s red glow envelops the screen. She’s the eponymous villainous heroine who opens Pablo Larraín’s erotic and suspenseful character study “Ema.” The Spanish-language film, the follow-up to 2016’s “Jackie,” sees a couple working to reclaim their son, even after the boy’s disturbing string of events.
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Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), a Reggaeton dancer living in Valparaíso, has a tumultuous relationship with her artistic director and boyfriend Gastón (Gael García Bernal). They’re the on-again-off-again couple who’s never truly broken-up or together. Off-again, their relationship teeters upon their son—a 7-year old and psychopathic Polo (Cristián Suárez), who froze a cat to death in a refrigerator and poured gasoline onto his aunt’s face and set her ablaze. Nevertheless, Ema wants him back. She wants him even though a social worker lividly describes her as a bad mother, claiming the next mother must surely be better than her.
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For his part, Larraín doesn’t concern himself with plot. Instead, he’s following a character and a mood, shrouding both in sex and mystery. The little story exposition he does provide happens in the first 15 minutes as Ema and her troupe dance beneath an animated neon solar whose cinematography points toward Gaspar Noé, whose shooting matches a music video, who’s backed by Nicolas Jaar’s infectious pounding score as shots of Ema’s domestic disputes with Gastón and her visits with the social worker intercut. Dependent upon these purely impressionistic segments, “Ema” isn’t an easy watch. And the outlandish plan to retrieve Polo lying at the film’s heart, leaves the audience no easy answers or coherent train of events.
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Instead, these apathetic characters lead the charge. There’s the Firestarter Ema, who spends many of her nights either prowling spaces for her and her revved-up team of female punk rebels to dance or for something to burn. Her mental state wildly veers from referring to Gastón as a “human condom” to dragging a woman out from his bed by the hair borders. We never know what thoughts race through her brain, other than the pain of not being a mother and her proclivity for using sex and as commodities for control. Di Girolamo as Ema is incredible throughout, sensually contorting her body in a Reggaeton style while her Mona Lisa smile dominates the frame. García Bernal also delivers a subtle yet astounding performance as the selfish two-faced Gastón. The two combined together are like doubles figure-skaters acrobatically pushing the other away knowing they’ll slide toward each other again.
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Most of the film’s 106 minutes concern Ema’s plan to retrieve her son. To reveal the lengths she goes to would be a spoiler, but suffice to say they’re disturbing and completely unpredictable—arrived to without sufficient grounding yet astoundingly accomplished nonetheless. Larraín’s “Ema” will grate some. Even so, it’s one of the most ambitious and visually stunning films of the year. [A-]
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