Valparaiso, Chile

A traffic light burns in the middle of the street.

Ema is a young woman, wanting to leave her partner Gastón, 12 years older, because their relationship ended with the failed adoption of Polo a child with psychiatric disorders. Ema is a contemporary dancer, and when, together with her friends, she dances reggaeton he, a choreographer, launches into an amusing invective against a dance that he says grants illusory spaces of freedom under the control of a ruthless system.

Ema, listens to him, accuses him of being sterile, abandons him and seeks him out. He constantly pursues something while his manipulative nature tends to incinerate like a merciless sphinx anyone who stands in the way of his will.

The adopted child set his sister's face on fire, but Ema does not want to give anything up. She is straight but also lesbian, she wants a child but returns it, she wants to dance and uses her body as a purely scrupulous act of seduction. She has bleached hair that seems to be glued on like a cheap wig, dresses like a rapper, and loves to induce temptation.

Her body is an infernal machine: an unleashed Prometheus with no restraints of measure, a contemporary Erinyes divining between bisexual bodies, a Bacchae in search of a spasm of life. There is always a funeral dance in her rhythm, a will to live without any desire whatsoever; an irrepressible urge to narcissistically seduce every soul to be plundered.

The 'incessant will to will that undermines her makes her functionary of a species that reproduces not life but compulsion.

If Raul Peralta wanted to be simply Tony Manero in Larraín's eponymous first feature here Ema wants to be simply everything.

If there the psychopathology is personal and experienced in a dictatorial context, here the psychopathology is transversal and experienced in a public context.

" If from 2000 to 2015, as many as 53 adoptions failed in Chile, it is a real fact that needs to be reflected upon," Larraín argues,

The nihilism that accompanies the new generations, the familial chaos that determines and predisposes it, are the common thread on which the Chilean director focuses his attention. Nicolas Jaar's conceptual electronic music, punctuates a colorful, aesthetic, hypnotic, alienated set design.

Like Raul from Tony Manero, Ema wants to dance and while he has only one goal to achieve iil which every means is justified, she cannot give up anything she wants everything whatever the means and end.

From the military dictatorship of the denial of possibilities, to the social dictatorship of the denial of all impossibilities; there is no limit and no choice because there is no desire screwed by the relentless will to want.

Everything is possible coincides with the ontological impossibility of being and founding a choice, the choice of limit, of rule, of ethics.

But perhaps Ema's choice, like that of the new generation, is not to choose and to let the disturbing host that is nihilism live and dance: the metaphysical triumph of Nothingness, colorful, rhythmic, frenetic, Dionysian, epileptic, incendiary but still Nothingness.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice