Review: In Director Pablo Larraín’s Ema, Mourning Becomes Electric

Pablo Larraín’s Ema opens on the purple haze of pre-dawn, the idyllic morning stillness broken by a streetlight that’s been set aflame. Nearby, a woman stands stoically while holding a flamethrower, staring at a bleary stretch of cityscape in Santiago as the sun begins to rise. As far as introductions go, Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo) makes an immediate impression: With bleached slicked-back hair like Draco Malfoy, she projects a punkish antisocialness, to the point that it seems like she could have spray-painted the ultraviolet and neon-green hues of the film’s color palette onto the frame. A dancer by trade, she regularly rehearses in lofts with a troupe of friends or twirls around town to the confusion and discomfort of others. She suggests a rupture, a glitch in the system of propriety, moving in blunt, aggressive ways that clash with the often-sedate settings in which she finds herself.

Ema’s personality matches her image. Her conversational style is acidic, particularly with her estranged choreographer husband, Gastón (Gael García Bernal), with whom she’s always cooking up a feast of invective. Both relentlessly taunt the other, Ema over his infertility, Gastón over her splintering mental health. Both take other sexual partners and flaunt their infidelities to each other, and much of the film pits Ema’s brutal, loud confrontations against Gastón’s cold passive-aggressiveness, and the only thing more unsettling about their caustic romance is how much the tethers that still connect them depend on this mutual cruelty.

The source of their tension is soon made clear: Wanting children, they adopted a boy, Polo (Cristián Suárez), whose behavior—setting fire to their home, stuffing a cat in a freezer—forced them to give him up. This rejection reverberates through Larraín’s film, like the aftershocks of a colossal earthquake, not merely unbalancing the couple but turning others against them. The teachers at the school where Ema works during the day—and where Polo attended classes—openly express their revulsion in a staff meeting about what to tell Polo’s classmates. Elsewhere, Ema’s friends in her dance troupe air their hostile feelings toward Gastón for how much of the responsibility for Polo’s abandonment he assigns to her.

Bernal, restrained in both his words and how he holds his body, imbues Gastón with an imperiousness that points to the man’s attempts to mask his guilt behind a stone face. Di Girolamo, meanwhile, is all movement. Even in close-up, the actress captures the perpetual jitteriness of her character’s being. For Ema, dancing becomes an outlet for her contradictory feelings of defiance and grief. The film’s music, both diegetic and extratextual, is by experimental electronic composer Nicolas Jaar, whose soundtrack combines ambient longueurs with brittle, frantic footwork—a sound that juts in and out of rhythm and force on skeletal beats and warm tone pulses. The music perfectly fits Ema’s own underground style of dance, a manifestation of a human uncontrollably eating herself from the inside out.

In that sense, Ema marks a fascinating inversion of Larraín’s prior film, Jackie, which concerned the pressures of having to filter one’s all-too-real grief through performative displays of propriety. Natalie Portman’s Jackie Kennedy, shell-shocked and robbed of her husband, lets the demands of office, even one as ceremonial and condescending as that of the first lady, dictate her behavior even in private. But Ema’s focus is on how mourning is expunged through chaos of words and flailing limbs, a movement that embodies a boundless sense of sexual wanderlust. As much as Ema and Gastón bicker, one is left to wonder just how much worse things would be for them if they didn’t act out against each other. Perhaps their guilt would fester and their mutual recrimination would boil over and erupt like a grease fire.

It would be all too easy for Ema to pass judgment on its protagonists, whether over their reflexive rejection of parenthood in the face of its hardships, their combative relationship, or their sexual promiscuity, but Larraín is too interested in the ambiguity of the characters’ physical expressions of their inner selves to condemn anyone. Indeed, a final act in which both Ema and Gastón lose themselves in sexual escapades is remarkable for how it ducks the usual depictions of hedonism as a sign of madness and loss of self, instead presenting their experimentation as affirmational and a cathartic reassertion of identity. In Ema, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of sustaining emotional ties.