As one says, “They think we do this for them, but we do this for us.” It seems like Ema and her dancers are done following instructions from men like Gaston and are finally willing to watch it all burn.Įveryone in “Ema” is strong, especially regular Larraín collaborator Bernal, who gets a few incredibly grounded dramatic beats, but the film belongs to Di Girolamo. The women in Ema’s troupe embrace this new form of constant expression, lighting cars on fire when they’re not dancing through the city. There’s an incredible number in the film that cuts Ema and her dance colleagues doing routines around this beautiful city with shots of her literally firing a flamethrower into the sky. She begins multiple sexual affairs and her dance routines, set to Reggaeton music, build in intensity that feels like she’s expressing both passion and pain she’s never released before. The decision and resulting dissolution of her marriage sends Ema into a spiral. Well, Ema is a villain at the school at which she teaches, where Polo was just a student, and Gaston is one in the dance troupe. The choice has not only turned them into walking ghosts but made them into villains in their community. However, after an incident involving a fire, they made the unthinkable decision and gave Polo back to the orphanage. They had a son named Polo, one whom they had adopted and made their own, even if Gaston thinks he was unnaturally close to Ema. As the film opens, intercutting to a mesmerizing stage performance with a backdrop that symbolically resembles both an exploding sun and a fertilizing egg, we are witness to conversations that reveal a recent rupture in the life of this couple.

But despite some chronological jumps throughout, we don’t meet Ema and Gaston in a happy chapter of their union. Mariana Di Girolamo gives one of the best performances of the year as Ema, a young, talented dancer in the small town of Valparaíso, Chile, who has married the director of her dance company, Gaston ( Gael García Bernal, also giving a stunner of a performance).

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