CANNES – A musical inspired by the 2018 feminist protests in Chile that included many students, Sebastián Lelio’s fascinating and frequently vibrant new film “La Ola” is unlike most anything he has done before. If you were to look through his recent filmography, which includes everything from the confined thriller of sorts “The Wonder” to the acclaimed drama “A Fantastic Woman,” you wouldn’t see him as one to take on a project like this. Yes, he’s directed music videos before, but a full feature-length musical is another undertaking entirely.
But not only does he manage to mostly weave together an interesting tapestry of what it means to fight against an uncaring and cruel system, the musical numbers themselves are essentially dynamic enough to draw you in for the more complex ideas at play. “La Ola” is far from perfect, often losing sight of its broader ideas for less well-executed narrative beats that don’t always cohere, but it still finds a tune where it counts.
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This all centers on the musical student Julia, played by the excellent newcomer Daniela López, who we first meet as she practices singing in class. However, there are bigger things going on, and soon she is outside dancing and singing with her fellow classmates about how they are going to be taking a stand against their institution’s failure to address the violence they are routinely facing as women.
They are met with the men calling into question their methods of allowing people to make anonymous accusations and saying that they should instead let them help by going through the proper process. Already, the absurdity of their response (heightened by the fact that they are also singing) and the ignorance it betrays about how the “right” way to go about fixing problems often means just leaving a broken status quo in place makes explicit that Lelio is not going to be leaving anything to chance in identifying the targets of his critique.
Where it then becomes more complicated is how Julia gets swept up in the protests. She is fully committed to the cause, but her role in the movement and an element of her past soon start to take center stage in a way that she didn’t intend. While part of this can feel like it’s attempting to make a more expansive story of resistance into a narrow one about a single person, this may indeed be the very point, as Julia soon gets put under an intense amount of individual scrutiny as a way of discrediting the movement writ large. As the collective begins to take increasingly radical actions, eventually taking over the school, the backlash only grows that much more aggressive. It instills the earlier moments of genuinely moving solidarity between the students with a sense of tragedy, as we can practically see the train that is the rest of society, hellbent on keeping them silent, hurtling down the tracks.
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When this comes to a head, “La Ola” also literally breaks through fourth wall after fourth wall and becomes infinitely more meta. Without tipping any of the specifics off, it even sees Lelio taking a couple of shots at himself and his part in this story. Does he go as hard at himself as he could have? Probably not, but it is a playful little aside that is just audacious enough to work. It also opens up new avenues for the film to reveal how frequently it is that resistance can be co-opted, undercut, and placated with empty reforms that don’t make any substantive changes. Indeed, “La Ola” indicts itself in this and whether even making a film about radical action is going to be able to do justice to the full scope of what it entailed. Thankfully, where other lesser recent musicals have failed to do right by their ideas or songs, this one mostly succeeds.
Specifically, hanging over all of this that when first hearing about a musical that’s grounded in real, urgent issues about gender and violence was premiering at the festival, it was apparently hard for some to not immediately jump to the big splash that was made by the initially praised “Emilia Pérez” just last year that soon became a complete nightmare for almost everyone involved (especially those who had seen it). Thankfully, “La Ola” is not only not anything like that, but it’s actually a lot more engaging as both a musical and a work of thoughtful filmmaking. When it arrives at a fittingly confined ending back with the characters who are still trying to stand together in a stormy world, it makes clear that the work of those fighting for change in a world resistant to it is never done. [B-]
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