11/12/24

Netflix

Jacques Audiard has always been an interesting and experimentlal writer/director, seeming to choose his projects at random and rarely sticking to a particular genre, throughout a career that began back in the early 90s. Emilia Pérez deals with the kind of subject matter that would frighten off many respected filmmakers. It’s a bizarre soap opera/fable about crime cartels, gender reassignment and the plight of ‘The Disappeared,’ the millions of people murdered by Mexican cartels. 

Oh, and did I mention that it’s also a musical?

Audiard throws himself headlong into the process with his usual glee and the upshot is that the film is being garlanded with nominations for all the big movie awards – and this at a time when many veteran directors are struggling to get their new projects even funded. If the object of the exercise is to get yourself noticed, Audiard is finally doing it big time. (His last film, The Sisters Brothers, an intriguing offbeat western, came and went with barely a ripple.)

Rita (Zoe Saldana) is an under-appreciated Mexican lawyer, who spends most of her time penning eloquent pleas to get the guilty off the hook. Out of the blue, she is contacted by notorious crime cartel boss. Manitas del Monte (played by trans actor, Karlas Sofia Gascón), a man so steeped in violence he now feels he has only one way of escaping an inevitable fate. He has always longed to be a woman, and wants Rita to secretly arrange gender reassignment for him. In return, he will make her fabulously wealthy and she can choose whatever future she wishes for herself. But Manitas will have to fake his own death and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and his two young boys can know nothing of their father’s new life.

Four years later, Rita meets Manitas again, but now she’s the titular Emilia, looking to reconnect with her wife and children by posing as the cousin they never knew they had. What’s more, Emilia wishes to atone for all the killing she instigated when she was Manitas…

Is Emilia Pérez a good film? Well, for me it has flashes of brilliance, but there are also some sizeable missteps. The songs, composed by Clément Ducol and Camille range from upbeat dance tunes to quirky half-spoken, half-sung observations about anatomy that sometimes veer close to the absurd. While these serve to highlight the fairytale unreality of the piece, the constant shifting of tone makes the film feel uneven. The ‘Mexican’ locations are pretty convincingly recreated (in France) by cinematographer Paul Guilhaume and I think the elements dealing with The Disappeared are genuinely moving. On the performance front, Saldana is an absolute powerhouse as the very adaptable Rita, singing and dancing up a storm – and it’s great to see her performing as a human being rather than as a green-skinned, spandex-clad alien!

As a cis male, I might have missed some of the nuances around the transgender elements of the story – and Gascón certainly delivers a compelling and heartfelt performance – but the process of transition seems to be used here as a metaphor for wiping the slate clean and beginning a new life, untainted by the past. However, the lesson Emilia ultimately learns is that this is impossible, and she has to do more than change the way she lives if she wants to atone for her earlier crimes. This makes the underlying message a little muddled.

But again, I feel I must tip my hat to Jacques Audiard who, at seventy years of age, is fearlessly going where few other directors would dare to tread. Long may he continue to thrive!

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney