Sometimes, it can be a rewarding experience to walk into a movie theater with no background information on the film you’re about to watch. Other times, the opposite is true. Based on its title and the relentless misery which film festival organizers typically mistake for social commentary, this reviewer expected “Emir” to be a bleak story about a young boy, probably blind or missing a limb, and his struggle to escape from an abusive parent or guardian.
But “Emir” defies all expectations. In its opening scene, a young woman—Amelia, the film’s protagonist—walks across a barren landscape, wondering aloud about what she feels is her unfulfilled destiny. She pauses, says something about her fruitless search for happiness, takes a deep breath, and starts to sing.
“Are my dreams in another place?” she sings. The music soars, the camera glides, and a peasant skips by, also singing, “How much profit can one turn from selling corn, garlic and tobacco?” Suddenly, the screen explodes with a village’s worth of backup dancers, twirling, sashaying and thrusting their hips as they chant to the dissatisfied Amelia: ”Never forget where you came from/ a country with fake freedom/ that’s why there are many like you!”
“Emir” is a musical. It is also a very, very strange movie.
Its strangeness is not just due to its being a musical, but because it’s a musical about overseas Filipino domestic servants, made with an indecipherable tone. It’s almost impossible to determine whether the film’s songs, situations and dialogue are tongue-in-cheek or just really corny. The backup dancers in one early scene are dressed as prostitutes, housemaids and nurses. The following musical sequence sees a gang of villagers chasing rats through a field while singing along to a very “Eye of the Tiger”-esque beat: “Oh, plaguing pests/dreadful rats/we drive them out/they come back/they’re hungry just like us!”
The film gets even stranger when Amelia travels to an unnamed, fictional Emirate (the film was actually shot in Morocco) to work for a sheikh who is also the Minister of Oil and, needless to say, incredibly wealthy—he already has six Filipinos tending to his palace. For a few minutes “Emir” threatens to be primarily about Amelia’s relationship with the other nannies, or “ya-yas.” Instead, the film hiccups from one sudden and vague love interest to another, before turning its focus to Amelia’s relationship with the sheikh and his family, the three kids in particular.
A subplot involving the rape of one of the characters is introduced and resolved in the span of three minutes. The film then widens its scope to include the other ya-yas, and a surprise trip to London (via green-screen technology), before making an alarming mutation into an altogether different beast: a war movie.
It’s during this unexpected third act, which sees most of the cast cruelly killed off in the blink of an eye, that it starts to seem like “Emir” might actually be the work of a crazy person. Two hours in, the film’s songs and candy-bright palette are replaced with bursts of violence, hectic nighttime chase scenes, and the introduction of a voice-over. It doesn’t last long, but it’s enough to remind you how uneven the entire movie has been. When, at one point towards the end, Amelia makes a reference to a lost love, chances are you’ll have no idea who she’s talking about.
As a musical, it’s also quite patchy—at times you get five songs crammed into three scenes, while other chunks of the film go by completely tune-free. The songs themselves are strange in their own way, with nineteen numbers flitting from sappy ballads, sassy rock theatrics, and oddly-paired duets. The end credits roll over a truly horrendous Filipino-English “comedy” rap performed by a group of women pushing empty baby strollers around a glittering stage.
It’s obvious that a lot of effort and dedication went into the making of “Emir,” and it’s certainly not the worst offender on this year’s list of festival competitors—that honor would, so far, go to Hungary. The cinematography is impressive without being flashy, and, in her debut, Frencheska Farr does a remarkable job grounding her character amidst the film’s whirlpool of improbable events.
The script, however, could have used more work, and would have benefited from the attention of someone other than all those voices in screenwriter Jerry Gracio’s head. Despite all his and director Chito S. Roño’s obvious efforts, the end result is not hugely original, just an unusual combination of mismatched clichés. Overlong, restless and endlessly absurd, “Emir” would make for a great drinking game; as the occasion for a sober night at the movies, it is much less satisfying.
