My Name is Emily
Directed by Simon Fitzmaurice
The Irish filmmaker Simon Fitzmaurice debuts with a surprising coming-of-age road film, My Name is Emily. After Emily's mother dies, the eccentricities of his father, wonderfully played by Michael Smiley, earns him a straight-jacketed ride to an asylum.
Emily, an interim orphan, is ostracized at school and develops a strong affection for an existential perspective on life He even flirts with suicide. Fitzmaurice, similarly to Salaviza, observes an emotionally-damaged child struggling to make sense of life. However, where the Portuguese filmmaker proceeds to do so in the vein of grittier realism, Fitzmaurice fiddles with genre conventions, squeezing melodrama and a road movie into a coming-of-age bracket.
Fitzmaurice seems to go down the Jaco van Dormael rabbit hole, tackling the style in which the Belgian filmmaker made his own poetics -- the double-edged sword of subversiveness and sentimentality -- whereas Fitzmaurice trades the subversiveness for existentialism and the gloomy Schopenhauer-like worldview.
Although the Irish director, unlike van Dormael, unspools the mood-building style in a linear fashion -- from existentialism to sentimentality -- thus using it as a framing device for the whole story. My Name is Emily is a crowd-pleasing drama, something like Uberto Pasolini´s Still Life (2013) for a teen audience and their parents.
Occasionally, fragments that sound like a motivational speech sneak into the lines of the teen heroine Emily, something about being struck down on knees and never giving up and moving on, those type of cathartic and uplifting elements that did not really work in Still Life. The reason why they do in My Name is Emily is because the film itself is a testament to Fitzmaurice´s never-giving-up attitude. It's also, really, a paragon, being the first feature film in the world made by a director suffering from motor neurone disease, lending the whole experience a new dimension.
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