‘The Wave’ review: Sebastian Lelio's ambitious feminist musical is set to Chile’s university strikes

Dir: Sebastian Lelio. Chile. 129 mins.

Feminist pride and anger pour out in a riot of song and dance numbers in Sebastian Lelio’s tribute to his home country’s ‘Chilean Feminist Wave’ protests and strikes of 2018. Reported around the world, these women-led mobilisations kicked off in universities that had been slow to respond to complaints of harassment and abuse against male faculty members. At their peak in April and May, as many as 32 universities around the country were occupied. 

The message is urgent, but the viewing experience is not

The director of the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman has set himself the challenge of distilling months of debate and denunciation of abuse and gender bias into a musical. The goal is to not only to make a line that translates into English as “you are no longer my dad in the ancestral sense” melodic, but to make it catchy too. Perhaps inevitably, he succeeds only in part. There’s a touch of the earnest theatre-workshop exercise about The Wave that is never entirely dispelled by its glossy production values. This, along with an indulgent plus-two-hour running time, will complicate its reception. The message is urgent, but the viewing experience is not.

Those tumultuous weeks and months of 2018 are channeled through the story of Julia, played by Daniela Lopez – a first-timer cast via a nationwide open call. Julia is a second-year music student at the University of Chile (the way she uses her voice in song and in solidarity becomes something of a keynote metaphor). A showstopper opening number set in her faculty’s main courtyard sees her caught up in the growing movement to protest against an academic body that ‘gives degrees to rapists’ – as written in capital letters on a huge banner that unfurls over the heads of Julia and her friends as they perform a kind of girl-power haka.

Volunteering to collect testimony from female students who have suffered abuse, Julia herself begins to uncover buried memories of a sexual encounter with Max (Nestor Cantillana), the assistant of her voice coach, that felt like rape.

We follow Julia home to the minimart she helps her mother to run in Santiago’s working class suburbs, and begin to understand that protests and occupations are sometimes luxuries for those students that can afford them. Composer Matthew Herbert worked with 17 female Chilean composers on the original songs that make up the soundtrack, but these are unevenly distributed in a film that might have played more strikingly, and concisely, as a sung-through affair. There’s a long lull before the occupation gets underway in earnest with the rousing ‘Universal Flood’ number – an exhilarating release of righteous female ire and energy as women students dressed in crimson Pussy-Riot-style balaclavas pour into the university’s modernist teaching corridors and stairwells, and fill the august, wood-panelled halls of the rector’s office, where stern male portraits stare down at them.

Thumping, dynamic dance numbers are captured in a rather conventional style, with lots of slow-creep tracks and crane shots. There is pushback from the male students, their protective mothers, and the faculty members these feminist activists denounce, demanding a fair hearing. The female occupiers themselves are not a united front; they’re spilt between those that favour dialogue and the cultivation of male allies, and the true secessionists. This conflict too is set to song.

Though their slogans are an accurate reflection of what happened back then – right down to a reluctance to be identified with the MeToo movement, because resistance to the entrenched Latin American patriarchy requires less orthodox tactics – the tone is too often crude and hectoring, especially in a crassly satirical sequence that parodies the police force’s ineffectual, victim-blaming approach to sexual abuse allegations. At one point, the fourth wall is broken so the arguing feminist factions can turn on the director himself to ask why the hell this film is being made by a man?

The Wave is nothing if not ambitious, and in its bittersweet ending it reaches a melancholic, nuanced understanding that once the feminist wave broke, the backlash began. But the kind of complex debates about consent, vigilante justice and empowerment that are deployed here sit uneasily in what is in some ways a classical female self-realisation musical. Perhaps this explains a certain reticence in newcomer Lopez’s acting style. For the audience, her hesitance is infectious.