Movie Review: Ema

Ema **** / *****

Directed by: Pablo Larraín.

Written by: Guillermo Calderón and Alejandro Moreno.

Starring: Mariana Di Girolamo (Ema), Gael García Bernal (Gastón), Santiago Cabrera (Aníbal), Paola Giannini (Raquel), Cristián Suárez (Polo), Giannina Fruttero (Sonia), Josefina Fiebelkorn (Perla), Mariana Loyola (Sara), Catalina Saavedra (Marcela), Paula Luchsinger (María), Paula Hofmann (Laura), Antonia Giesen (Renata), Susana Hidalgo (Paulina), Eduardo Paxeco (Carlos), Natalia Bakulic (Lisa).

 

Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo) doesn’t care if you like her or not – which is good, because I have a feeling that many people who watch the film will end up hating her. Before the movie even begins, she does something horrible, and yet doesn’t seem to feel too much guilt over it, and in fact does things in the movie that could very well make things worse for all involved. But she is also undeniably herself – and has a pull to her, that makes everyone around her drawn to her.

 

As directed by Pablo Larrain, Ema is a visually stunning film, less concerned with plot – admittedly, the film is confusing for at least its first half – then it is being a character study of Ema herself, who the movie doesn’t judge, but surely you will. She has a slicked back mop of blonde hair, is a reggaeton dancer, whose rountines with her all female trope purposely ooze with sex, perhaps even more than the films sex scenes do. She is married to Gastón (Gael Garcia Bernal) – although they have one of those relationships where you aren’t sure if they love or hate each other – because it’s probably both. You can never really tell if they are together or apart – and it doesn’t really matter which, because both of them will fuck anyone else they want to, should the opportunity arise.

 

The plot revolves around the couples former adopted son, Polo (Cristián Suárez), a troubled young boy if ever there was one. He has put a cat in the freezer, where it froze to death, and set his aunt ablaze – that fire apparently serving as an inspiration for Ema, who uses blowtorches throughout the movie. Ema and Gaston have returned Polo – who has been placed somewhere else – but Ema has not forgotten him, and still considers herself his mother. The social worker is blunt with Ema – she was a horrible mother, the entire system is setup to ensure people like her do not adopt children, and whoever the hell has adopted Polo now are surely better for him than Ema and Gaston were. Not having that, Ema sets about ensuring that she will be a part of Polo’s life – hell, a part of his family, no matter what.

 

Larrain’s film veers all over the place visually. In many of the dances sequences, you may well recall Gaspar Noe’s Climax from last year – as the dancer’s writhe and contort themselves in extended sequences that remind you of music videos – although music videos are almost never this good. At the heart is this relationship between Ema and Gaston – who seem to take pleasure in hurting each other, as if they are enacting their own sort of twisted version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. When they’re together, Ema does little but insult and belittle Gaston. When he sleeps with someone else, Ema drags her out by her hair. The two performances by Di Girolamo and Garcia Bernal are brilliant – playing selfish, self-involved people, but in different registers – she is all fire and emotion, he acts like a petulant child.

 

I am sure that for many, Ema will be a trial to sit through – all that visual opulence, that can go on seemingly endlessly, the arguments designed to hurt that go on for just as long, and Ema’s plan, which is brilliant at achieving her goals, but may in fact be monstrous, etc. For me though, the whole package was thrilling. The movie is brilliantly made, ambiguous, and has two characters that you are likely to forget. Larrain is a director I run hot and cold on – I loved his last film, Jackie, featuring a brilliant performance by Natalie Portman, which made her personal aftermath of the Kennedy Assassination into a horror film – but didn’t like The Club or No nearly as much as others did. Here though, he is basically attempting a high wire act – and pulls it off.

Movie Review: Neruda

Neruda

Directed by: Pablo Larraín.

Written by: Guillermo Calderón

Starring: Luis Gnecco (Pablo Neruda), Gael García Bernal (Oscar Peluchoneau), Alfredo Castro (Gabriel González Videla), Mercedes Morán (Delia del Carril), Diego Muñoz (Martínez), Pablo Derqui (Víctor Pey), Michael Silva (Àlvaro Jara), Jaime Vadell (Jorge Alessandri), Marcelo Alonso (Pepe Rodriguez), Francisco Reyes (Bianchi), Alejandro Goic (Jorge Bellett), Emilio Gutièrrez Caba (Pablo Picasso).

 

It can be an odd experience watching a biopic of a famous person of whom you don’t really know anything about. My knowledge of Pablo Neruda pretty much begins (and ends) with The Simpsons episode where Lisa quotes him, and Bart says “I am aware of the work of Pablo Neruda”. I didn’t even know that he was a politician in addition to being a poet. In Pablo Larrain’s Neruda, it’s both the writer and the politician that the filmmaker is interested in – concentrating on a brief time in the late 1940s, when Chile outlawed Communism, and arrested many Communists. Neruda was a Senator for the Communist party at the time – and one of its highest profile members. The movie opens with apparently all the Senators in a large bathroom (in case you’re in doubt about what Larrain thinks of them), in the aftermath of a speech that Neruda gave denouncing the President of Chile – a man he had previously supported. For a little more than a year, Neruda lived underground in Chile until he was finally able to escape to over the mountains Argentina – where he lived in exile for a few years. Neruda, the film, concentrates on the man hiding out – and Oscar Peluchoneau, the cop hot on his trail.

 

It really is Peluchoneau who is the film’s most interesting character – not least because the film openly admits that he is a fictional character, created by Neruda himself. Peluchoneau is played by Gael Garcia Bernal with a knowing blankness – he looks like he’s straight out of a 1940s film nor – he’s all hat, mustache and attitude, and no substance. Neruda leaves him detective novels throughout the film – a way to mock Peluchoneau for missing him yet again, but perhaps also to let Peluchoneau know how he is supposed to behave. The film has one character explain why it’s better for the government for Neruda not to be captured – they need him out of the way, but not arrested – that may make him into a martyr – so perhaps the reason why Neruda invents Peluchoneau is because no one was really chasing him at all, and yet in order to become the kind of downtrodden, obsessed folk hero Neruda wanted to be, he needed someone chasing him.

 

Luis Gnecco is fine as Neruda – he’s a large, bald man, who seems both to want to capitalize on his fame, and ignore it when it doesn’t suit him. He likes to go out and party – yet he’s recognized everywhere, and asked to recite the same poem again and again. He is the life of the party, but also tired of being the life of the party – both in love with his wife, and yet cruel to her at times (he tells at one point to go ahead and kill yourself – that way, I’ll be able to write about you for another 20 years). In many ways, these scenes are both fairly standard in a biopic – the great man is also a real person, and not always a great one – and different for one – these are not the kind of scenes that normally go into one, because Neruda isn’t really doing anything in them. For a film a politician, Neruda never really makes it clear what the titular character believes in aside from “communism”. To be honest, these scenes are more than a little dull at times – especially as the film progresses, and seems to be repeating itself.

 

What is never dull though is the filmmaker – which again shows Larrain at peak form. Just a weak after praising his work on Jackie – his English language debut, and one of the best films of the year – I have to praise Larrain again here. The cinematography here is excellent – playing with classic Hollywood stylings (like rear projection), while using the digital form to make a film steeped in shadows. Aside from the score – because Mika Levi’s Jackie score is next level brilliant – Neruda is every bit the technical achievement Jackie was.

 

Perhaps the reason then that I didn’t love Neruda the same way I loved Jackie is because I had no prior connection to the story or characters. I think Larrain does a brilliant job with Jackie, and yet, I also think that you have to do some of your own heavy lifting with the film before you come in – if you don’t know Jackie Kennedy before, I’m not sure what you’ll think about her seeing the film. And perhaps that’s my real problem with Neruda – I’m still not exactly sure who he was, even though he is the central character in this fascinating movie.

Movie Review: Jackie

Jackie

Directed by: Pablo Larraín.

Written by: Noah Oppenheim.

Starring: Natalie Portman (Jackie Kennedy), Peter Sarsgaard (Robert F. Kennedy), Greta Gerwig (Nancy Tuckerman), Billy Crudup (Theodore H. White), John Hurt (Father Richard McSorley), Max Casella (Jack Valenti), Beth Grant (Lady Bird Johnson), Richard E. Grant (William Walton), Caspar Phillipson (President John F. Kennedy), John Carroll Lynch (President Lyndon B. Johnson).

 

Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is not a typical biopic of one of America’s most famous first ladies. Largely taking place in the week after her husband was assassinated in Dallas, Jackie zooms in for a close-up view of Jackie Kennedy in those days – in the audience, we can see she’s suffering from PTSD, but no one in the movie seems to notice. Everyone around her seems more concerned with what’s going to happen next – her brother-in-law Bobby is distraught about how little they actually accomplished, Lyndon Johnson wants to swear in as soon as possible, and then push the Kennedys aside while looking sympathetic, publicly – his wife is seen in the background picking out fabric swatches as Jackie tries to make funeral arrangements. The film gets close to Jackie – uncomfortably so, as the camera often sees her in close-up – right up in her face – and yet the film ultimately keeps us at a distance from Jackie, because that is exactly what she is doing. Throughout the film, she plays various roles, dons various masks – only occasionally letting her guard down at all. She becomes obsessed with the funeral arrangements – because she knows how important appearances are – they are everything, so no matter the truth of her marriage, she is going to ensure that her husband gets the sendoff he deserves.

 

Natalie Portman gives one of the best performances of the year as Jackie. The accent she dons for Jackie is distracting just for a minute or two – we’re not used it coming out of her mouth – but quickly, we settle into it. The framing device of the movie has Jackie talking to a reporter (Billy Crudup), just a week after the Assassination of her husband – and it’s clear from the outset that Jackie intends the story he is writing to come up precisely how she wants it to. Throughout the interview she teases him a little bit – revealing some darker parts of herself, and then pulling back (“You don’t think I’m going to let you publish that, do you?”). It mirrors what we see her do throughout much of the rest of the movie – as she has to stare down Bobby Kennedy, the Johnsons’ people, the Secret Service, etc. – in order to have the funeral procession that her husband deserves. She’s more honest with the reporter than she is with the rest of them – at least she reveals a little of how broken she is to him, something she steadfastly hides from the others she needs to stare down.

 

The other part of the film feels a little odd at first – it’s a flashback to a TV special from earlier in the Kennedy administration where Jackie gives the viewers at home a guided tour of the White House – and explains everything she did – the acquiring of the historical items, restoring the White House. What do these segments – seen in black and white, with Jackie more stiff and awkward than normal – have to do with the rest of the film? After a while though it sinks in – first of all, it’s yet another mask Jackie is wearing – the fake plastic smile on her face, the way she so loving greets her husband when he joins her (even though, at other parts of the movie, it’s made clear that their marriage wasn’t particularly good – and he thought her own redesign project of the White House was a waste of money and time). For another, it works just as she describes her goal to the interviewer – to remind people that the Presidents are real people. It’s yet another brilliant aspect of Portman’s performance – another facet, another way of hiding the truth in plain sight.

 

On a technical level, Jackie is quite simply, masterful. I’ve run hot and cold on Larrain’s films in the past – but his chilly exteriors are perfectly suited for this film. The cinematography is wonderful, the production design and costume design capture the period perfectly. The most ingenious decision was to hire Mica Levi to do the score - doing her second score ever, after her brilliant work on Under the Skin. The score carries this movie along – it’s ever present, and risks being off-putting. Yet it underlines what Larrain and company are doing here – making a fractured portrait, almost a horror film, out of this one woman’s grief.

 

Jackie doesn’t strive to give you a complete portrait of Jackie Kennedy – it may not even be a wholly accurate one. But it’s a powerful film about grief, and the roles people like Jackie Kennedy has to play – the masks she has to wear – the heartbreaking decisions, both public and private, she had to make. It’s easily one of the year’s best films.

Movie Review: The Club

The Club
Directed by: Pablo Larraín.
Written by: Guillermo Calderón & Pablo Larraín & Daniel Villalobos.
Starring: Roberto Farías (Sandokan), Antonia Zegers (Hermana Mónica), Alfredo Castro (Padre Vidal), Alejandro Goic (Padre Ortega), Alejandro Sieveking (Padre Ramírez), Jaime Vadell (Padre Silva), Marcelo Alonso (Padre García), Francisco Reyes (Padre Alfonso), José Soza (Padre Lazcano).

In Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, there are several scenes dealing with a non-descript house in the neighborhood of one of the reporters, who is horrified to discover that the Catholic Church is using it to shelter a group of priests who have been accused of pedophilia. The inside of the house – and its residents – is never seen in Spotlight, and it remains an ominous presence – in part because of just how normal the house is. Pablo Larrain’s The Club takes place inside a house like the one in Spotlight – in a small, seaside town in Chile, where four Priests and a nun are locked away from the outside world. The Nun, Monica (Antonia Zegers), runs the house – cooks the meals, sets the rules, etc. – and the four Priests spend their days not doing very much of anything other than training a greyhound to race in the local weekly races – which they watch from atop a hill with a set of binoculars. A fifth priest comes to live at the house, and the rules are explained to him – basically, that he can only go into town early in the morning, or well into the evenings, and can only go by himself. This house doesn’t want any attention – but that is precisely what this new priest brings. He’s barely there when the house receives a visitor – a man named Sandokan (Roberto Farias) who stands outside the house screaming – he recognizes as one who had sexually abused him as a child and is making a lot of noise outside the house. The new priest is given a gun to scare away Sandokan – but instead uses it to commit suicide.

The men who live in the house represent the “old” Catholic Church – the one who would sweep things under the rug and forget about them. After the suicide, they send Padre Garcia (Marcelo Alonso) to the house to question the Priests – and he’s supposed to be the “new” way – more open, less secretive. Rumors swirl through the house that Garcia has closed down several other houses like theirs – and that he’s there to do the same thing this time – get the Priests to confess, and throw them to the wolves. Garcia seems like the most moral of the characters – but gradually, it appears that perhaps the Church hasn’t changed as much as it likes to think.

The Club is at its best during the interview scenes – when Garcia questions the different priests – and surprisingly, the nun – about their secrets and why they ended up locked in this house. The movie, smartly, still doesn’t reveal all of what the Priests did – they remain evasive and stubborn in the face of Garcia’s questions. One, who has been there since the late 1960s, has gone senile and – and there’s no file on him, so no one knows why he’s there. The others evade Garcia’s questions – or will only partially admit things – like Padre Vidal (Alfredo Castro), who will confess to being gay – which he believes is sexuality that brings him closer to God, but not to abusing children. Another, Padre Ortega (Alejandro Goic) – was involving in taking children from the poor and giving (or perhaps) them to the rich – and questions what right Garcia has to question him, when he clearly doesn’t understand. The Nun evades the question of her guilt simply by saying things like “They said I abused her”. All of these men – and one woman – have been trapped in this house for years to think about what they have done, the sins they have committed – and yet they don’t seem like they’ve even scratched the surface of their guilt. Everything is still someone else’s fault. Not even the presence of Sandokan – who will not go away, even if he’s not blowing the whistle on the priests either – helps them. He stalks around – a shadow of the people they themselves victimized, his sad life should show the consequences of their actions – but they cannot see it that way.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie isn’t as good as those interview scenes – and the film gets weaker as it moves along, and Larrain seems determined to add more and more unnecessary plot to a movie that at its best when it’s plot less- including a convoluted, violent, nightmare climax which is unnecessarily grim and brutal – although wholly unexpected (always worry in a movie like this for the long-term safety of the dog). Larrain seems convinced that he needs to bash the audience over the head with his message, which ultimately ends up not having the impact it should. The entire movie is shot in the drabbest, dirtiest grey color palette imaginable – the better for all the misery to come out – but it becomes monotonous and monochrome pretty early, and stays that way.

The clergy molestation scandal that rocked the Catholic Church remains an interesting story – and there are ways to explore new ground in it, despite all the movies and documentaries that have already been made on the subject. Unfortunately, The Club isn’t one of those movies. It has good moments – and good performances – but it doesn’t really add up to all that much, other than the fact that these men are bad, and even good Priests like Garcia can go too far in trying to protect the Church. More scenes like the interview scenes – where Larrain forces us to share space with the priests, and see a little bit of their thought process – both about the crimes they committed, and how they justify them to themselves – and The Club have been something more than it is – which is basically just another misery tour, without a whole lot to say.

Movie Review: No

No
Directed by: Pablo Larraín.
Written by: Pedro Peirano based on the play by Antonio Skármeta.
Starring: Gael García Bernal (René Saavedra), Alfredo Castro (Lucho Guzmán), Luis Gnecco (José Tomás Urrutia), Néstor Cantillana (Fernando), Antonia Zegers (Verónica Carvajal), Marcial Tagle (Alberto Arancibia), Pascal Montero (Simón Saavedra), Jaime Vadell (Minister Fernández), Elsa Poblete (Carmen).

In 1988, under pressure from the International Community, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet allowed a referendum on whether or not he should continue being President for the next 8 years. His bloody dictatorship had lasted 15 years, yet no one really believed he would lose. While each side – the Si and No – would get 15 minutes of air time on National TV every night for a month leading up the referendum to make their case, Pinochet controlled the airwaves, so he basically had all but 15 minutes a day to make his case. Pablo Larrain’s No, which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this past year, tells the story of how the No side won the referendum. As with Argo, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty, the debate in Chile has raged on about just how accurate the film is. And it’s easy to see why. When the referendum came down on the No side – ousting Pinochet – it was a proud moment for the country –a sign that their people would not be terrified into silence and passive acceptance. But what No argues is that the case made for the No side was really shallow and superficial – the ad executive in charge of the No campaign uses the same tactics to sell “No” as he does to sell soda.

The film stars Gael Garcia Bernal as Rene Saavedra. He is a successful advertising executive, who father was more outspoken and political than he is which lends him some credibility on the opposition side. When he is approached about running the No campaign, he initially refuses. His boss is running the Si campaign, and Rene is more concentrated on making a lot of money to support his son – his estranged wife protests against Pinochet and his regime, and has the bruises to prove it. But eventually, he agrees.

The movie doesn’t present the No side is the kindest of lights – although certainly, they are presented more positively than the Si side, who are really just spineless yes men, who knows what Pinochet has done, and doesn’t care because it’s good for them. But the No side is full of stuffy intellectuals and idealists, who want to sell statistics and intellectual arguments to the people of Chile. They don’t think they have a chance to win, so all they really want to do is to present the facts of Pinochet to the public –to get the information out there. But Rene disagrees. He doesn’t want to depress the people – they do that, and they will lose. So he comes up with a series of ads that are basically pretty people smiling, dancing, having a good time and voting “No”. He doesn’t sell the audience the truth – just some murky version of Hope and Change (sound familiar?).

This makes No a rather strange experience. You would think that a movie like this would be an inspirational film, about people rising up against a brutal regime. But what No really is, is about the people of Chile were duped into doing the right thing, even if it was for the wrong reasons. Does the end justify the means? In this case, sure it does. But what does it say about people that all you have to do to get them to vote the way you want them to is sell them a lie? And that so many people just went along with the lie.

This is why the film is being debated in Chile. I don’t know the true story of what really happened during the referendum – perhaps the ads had little effect on the public, who were going to vote to begin with. But by presenting the victory this way, Larrain undercuts the inspirational aspect of the movie, and makes something a little darker, a little more cynical, a little more thought provoking than it otherwise would be.

No is said to conclude a trilogy for Lorrain about Pinochet and Chile – following the serial killer drama Tony Mareno (2008), about a selfish man obsessed with Saturday Night Fever and Post Mortem (2010), about a morgue in the last days before Pinochet took over. I have not seen either of those films (I meant to see both, but somehow never did), but on the basis of No, I think I should go back and watch them. Lorrain’s film is not an easy one – or at least, it offers no easy answers. It also looks deliberately crude (Lorrain wanted to recreate the video look of the 1980s, and does a remarkable job of it). Gael Garcia Bernal continues to impress in the lead role. But No is not really about any of its characters. It is about Chile in detail, and Democracy in general. It is a fascinating little film.