In Pablo Larraín’s Ema, street dance becomes a liberating force for chaos and change




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Ema is Larraín’s first movie set in present-day Chile, with the director interested in exploring the experience of a younger generation. (Supplied: Palace Films)

Dance has long had the power to transform moments in the cinema, and not just in musicals: think of the teenagers shaking off their detention blues in The Breakfast Club; the way Rosie Perez seemed to ripple with every tense beat during the intro of Do the Right Thing; or Denis Lavant moving with frenzied abandon at the end of Beau Travail – bursts of joy, fury and catharsis integral to their creator’s visions.

In Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín’s (Jackie; Neruda) new drama Ema, dance becomes a liberating force for chaos and change, pushing against established notions of art, family and gender – in the shape of his magnetic, platinum-haired star Mariana Di Girólamo.

She’s Ema, the lead performer in a contemporary dance company based in the Chilean port city of Valparaíso: acid wash denim and sweatpants by day, bodysuits and expressive synchronicity by night.

The dance troupe – choreographed by her lover, Gastón (Gael García Bernal) – moves in silhouette against a pulsing, blood red sun, while Nicolás Jaar’s uneasy soundscape suggests imminent emotional rupture.

Sure enough, Ema’s relationship with the 12-years-older Gastón is falling apart. He’s infertile, so they adopted a troubled young Columbian boy, Polo (Cristián Suárez), only to give him away after he sets the family home (and Ema’s sister) on fire.

It soon becomes clear that mother and adopted son are kindred spirits, wild and misunderstood – especially by Gastón, who Bernal plays as a petulant child (in overalls, to boot), blaming Ema for their failure as parents rather than taking responsibility for his own actions.

“A woman’s betrayal is much harder,” he insists — a self-righteous remark that borders on gaslighting. “I was a little girl and you didn’t take care of me,” she shoots back.

Forced out of the dance company by a spiteful Gastón, Ema takes refuge with her girlfriends in the street dancing community formed around reggaeton – the sensual Puerto Rican style synonymous with dancehall, hip hop and the city’s working class, and derided by Gastón as “hypnotic music that turns you into a fool”.

She also – in the movie’s most memorable image – takes to setting the city on fire at night with a flamethrower, scorching the streets with napalm-powered blasts that might as well be Godzilla’s radioactive breath.

With her gas pack and blast helmet, Ema resembles an intergalactic exterminator sent to raze the earth in preparation for some new, incoming form of life – or, as she puts it, to “Burn in order to sow again”.

Larraín’s film is built around these kinds of intoxicating, subversive images; it understands the irresistible smell of gasoline and fire and chaos, destruction breeding creation.

Images of Ema torching the city have an unmistakable resonance with the recent past, with town statues ablaze and girls posing for selfies in front of burning fairgrounds; the new mocking the old, daring things to fall apart for the better.

As the city burns, Ema becomes an agent of gender mayhem, moving fluidly – with an elegant assist from editor Sebastián Sepúlveda – across a spectrum of new lovers, both male and female.

When Ema begins separate, secretive relationships with a married couple – fortysomething divorce lawyer Raquel (Paola Giannini) and her firefighter husband Aníbal (Santiago Cabrera, of Big Little Lies) – it’s tempting to see it as her wreaking havoc upon the traditional family unit, disrupting the kind of life she had rejected.

But there’s something generous about her love, the way she lights up Raquel and opens the older woman up to a spectrum of experience. With her boyish frame and androgynous crop Ema could be an emissary for a non-binary future, glam and otherworldly.

Meanwhile, the dancing, choreographed by Jose Luís Vidal and joyously shot in various shades of colour on the streets and on the piers, becomes an invocation to this new world.

Set against the celestial choreography of the dance company, these scenes reinforce the blurring of high and low culture for a younger generation; a paradox that the genre-fluid Larraín – who has moved with ease between politics (No), poetry (Neruda), and off-kilter American biopics (Jackie) – typically relishes.

(This isn’t the first time Larraín has explored the world of dance, either: his 2008 breakout, Tony Manero, followed a middle-aged Chilean’s obsession with recreating John Travolta’s moves from Saturday Night Fever.)

Larraín and his regular cinematographer Sergio Armstrong concoct a rich, multi-coloured visual landscape that seems to take place inside a mood ring, moving from reds and purples to Vertigo greens that capture the excitement of a world in constant, uncertain flux.

As Ema, Di Girólamo is a force, enigmatic yet explosive, and she seems to channel a society’s changing ideas about family. The film is full of questions about the gendered, maternal demands placed on women in a world where men still regard women as mothers and wives, and say things like: “With this woman… I’ll start a civilisation.”

There are also implied critiques of class and colonisation, where Venezuelan and Columbian kids are seen as an unadoptable underclass, street dancing remains the language of the poor, and a ‘tourist’ artist – Bernal’s Gastón – is beholden to European ideas of performance.

If the film can steer a little too easily into a “diverse families” narrative, then Larraín leaves a door open – greased with a conspiratorial glance and a dash of gasoline – that reminds us that change is the only constant.

After all, one generation’s new ideas about love and family become the established norm for the next to tear down.

The dancers change, but the dance remains.

Ema is in cinemas from May 13.

Source: Thanks msn.com