Ema

Mariana Di Girólamo

The first film I saw of Pablo Larraín’s was 2008’s Tony Manero, which was about a man whose passion in life was posing as John Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, out of Saturday Night Fever. Larraín’s interest in people pretending to be something they’re not continues in Ema, which also happens to be a film pretending to be something it’s not. Even without the late gotcha moment when both Ema and the film are upended, what we have here is a mix of character study, formal experiment and genre pastiche, served up in two separate visual flavours by DP Sergio Armstrong, his usual gauzy, alienated lighting style punctuated by moments of boiling vital colour. … Read more