![]() ![]() Their relationship has frayed to the point of disintegration, not only as failed parents blaming each other but as dancers of different generations. Stick to your f-ing dancing.”Įma is the star dancer in a modern dance troupe directed by her husband, Gaston (played by Gael Garcia Bernal, in his third collaboration with Larrain). You should have been given back!” comes the fuming reply. She wants the social worker to tell him she loves him. Ema and her husband adopted nine-year-old Polo but, for reasons we will learn later, sent him back. We get some sense of the swirl of emotions powering Ema (played by the extraordinary Mariana Di Girolamo, in her first film role after serving a soap opera apprenticeship) in the dull light of the afternoon, when she confronts a social worker in her office to ask after Polo. You might describe the film as a relationship drama but, once again, he has thrown the rule book out of the window. Neruda approached the great poet’s life through the eyes of a policeman trying to kill him, a figure who may have been one of Neruda’s own imaginings, while Jackie – his first film in English, starring Natalie Portman - meticulously dissected the former First Lady’s iconic status. Mariana Di Girolamo and Gael Garcia Bernal play a couple who return their adopted son in Ema. A coruscating film about errant priests, The Club, was too unsettling to be distributed widely but in Chile, he says drily, it ensured the ongoing enmity of the church hierarchy. The son of a conservative minister in Chile’s right-wing government has a portfolio that includes his blistering “Pinochet trilogy” – Tony Manero, Post Mortem and the Oscar-nominated No, all of which burrow into corners of life under dictatorship. Without question, Pablo Larrain is one of the most interesting directors in contemporary cinema. ![]() “I think you have just used the key word in cinema.” Director Pablo Larrain is happy to hear that. We will soon feel the full force of her fury, although what drives the eponymous Ema to burn down bits of the Chilean port city of Valparaiso remains something of a mystery. A young, loose-limbed woman walks along a waterfront in the first glimmer of dawn, a gas tank strapped to her back. The first thing you hear in Ema is the crackling of flames, overtaken by the swell of mournful music. ![]()
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