Film reviews: The flamethrower of Ema meets the gentle animal rhythms of Gunda, as VIFF Centre reopens
Pablo Larraín’s bold reggaeton dance epic makes a visual splash and a bold punk statement on the big screen
THE REOPENING OF a cinema after almost 12 months requires a certain kind of film: a bit of visual audacity, the element of surprise, and the kind of storytelling that simply wouldn’t translate on the small screen.
Vancity Theatre’s lineup has all of that, plus some wonderful weirdness thrown in. Think of this trio as an unexpected and provocative array of films well suited to the end of an unpredictable and surreal year.
Ema
Ema’s striking opening image features a traffic light on fire, blinking and burning against a pink-twilight sky. Meet Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), a platinum-haired pyromaniac who prowls the city with a flamethrower.
It’s the first in a nonstop series of boldly shot visuals, as director Pablo Larraín tells the story of a woman ready to burn it all down.
The Chilean auteur is best-known for his unexpected Jackie, in which he focused on a woman—Natalie Portman’s Jacqueline Kennedy—who must remain composed and restrained despite the horrors unfolding around her. Here, he returns to his home country to explore a woman who refuses to be restrained—or comply in any way.
The setup is that young dancer Ema and her older husband, the tightly wound choreographer Gastón (Gael García Bernal), have recently had to “return” their adopted son, Polo, to an orphanage. Both blame each other for his uncontrollable behaviours. Ema’s reaction to the grief, rage, and shame over her failure to parent is to sleep with anyone and everyone. That cathartic sexual release is mirrored by an artistic one, in which she leads a female gang of reggaeton dancers who move to music that Gastón mocks.
Does style sometimes take precedence over substance? Possibly. But the surfaces are so alluring here, and the raw punk energy is such a rush, that it’s hard to care about that. Larraín turns coastal Valparaiso into a kind of new-wave dreamscape. Watch Ema strut through a zig-zag of sorbet-hued modernist buildings, or the way the director plays neon purple, green, and orange light off her tracksuits in the same gaudily gorgeous colours. Nicolas Jaar’s synthy-electroacoustic, reggaeton-driven soundtrack adds another heady layer.
The dance sequences are mesmerizing, used more to express the lead character’s inner impulses than anything like the “dance numbers” you’d see in a more conventional musical film. Larraín plays Gastón’s sophisticated choreographed worlds off the unleashed, pulsing rhythms of Ema’s crew. Early on, we see Gastón overseeing a massive, swirling dance piece against a video projection of solar flares. Later, Ema lets loose to throbbing reggaeton beats on rooftops and graffiti-covered portsides, set against Valparaiso’s dusk sky.
It’s strange, delirious, and stylized—sometimes as impenetrable as Ema’s steely, teasing smile; often it feels non-narrative. Di Girolamo hands in an unforgettable performance that feels fearlessly real. But Ema and her partner spar in dialogue that feels heightened and melodramatic, and some plot points are downright bizarre—from a sister maimed by Polo’s fire antics, to the reason cited for Ema getting her hands on napalm.
Larraín struggles even more to tie this unruly explosion of lust, rebellion, family, and firethrowers into an impactful ending. Ema is going to divide audiences, but here’s betting that even the ones who hate it will love hating it.
Gunda
Victor Kossakovsky's luminous black-and-white documentary opens with an extended take of a giant sow snoozing on a pile of hay that spills out of a barn door. After several quiet minutes, the true superstars of the movie arrive, tumbling out over her body: a brood of tiny squeaking piglets.
It’s an apt introduction to the slow, natural rhythms of the farm the filmmaker captures here. Gunda requires you to put on the brakes—and if you’re able to forget about the stresses of the world outside the theatre, you’ll be richly rewarded. Part of the appeal is the gorgeous textures Kossakovsky's team finds in the piles of hay and sticky mud puddles, often shot at pig’s-eye level.
The documentary shows the quiet wonder on the farm: a one-legged chicken hopping through the grass, or in curious piglets trying to catch rain droplets in their mouths.
Without any narration, Gunda tells the story of the title sow and her brood, right down to its awkward little runt. Babe and Charlotte’s Web evoked a similar kind of porcine empathy. But what’s astonishing here is that, without any narration, forced anthropomorphism, or animal-rights lecturing, Kossakovsky delicately exposes the exhausted dedication of the mother and the unrelenting demands of her offspring. Watch the way she tries to push the limping runt along and show it how to root. And the ethical questions all that raises bubble up organically.
If you know why pigs are on farms, you know it won’t necessarily end happily—but even so, you may be surprised at how much you’re moved by the subtle imagery in Gunda’s poetic final chapter.
Mandibles
Describing Quentin Depieux’s comical caper as a French Dumb and Dumber does not quite do it justice—mostly because the film features a housefly that’s roughly the size of a human five-year-old. But then, to suggest that the surprisingly adorable monster insect gives this silly effort a surreal, Lynchian quality would make it seem way more highbrow than it is.
Kafka this most definitely is not.
Mandibles is so out there that it defies that kind of categorization, just as it kind of defies reviewing at all—mostly due the fact that it’s so openly ridiculous. Just when you think its central buddy duo are headed one direction, the plot takes a hard left to somewhere else entirely.
And so it is that loser pals Jean-Gab (David Marsais) and Manu (Grégoire Ludig) get derailed when they’re hired to deliver a strange suitcase to a mystery man. That’s because they discover the giant fly in the trunk of the stolen Mercedes they’re going to use—and they decide they can make thousands by training it to rob banks.
That’s just the first “zig” in a zig-zagging film that will also bring you into contact with a woman whose brain damage causes her to yell at the top of her lungs.
We won’t describe more, as Mandibles’ featherlight plot has not to much else to it. Trailer homes will burn. Secret handshakes will ensue. Jokes will be milked. A bit of the humour is lost to the idiosyncracies of language, class, and culture here.
But there’s something dopily enjoyable about the way its two goofy leads stagger through life—and the way Depieux can turn a heist movie on its absurdist ear.
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