EMILIA PERÉZ (2024)
In Mexico, a lawyer is offered a chance to help a cartel boss retire by becoming a woman.
In Mexico, a lawyer is offered a chance to help a cartel boss retire by becoming a woman.
Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is a lawyer in Mexico frustrated with defending those who make the streets dangerous for women and minorities. After being involved in a much-televised murder trial, Rita receives a mysterious call with a proposition that promises to make her rich. She obliges and finds herself pushed into a car with her head covered and talking to one of the country’s feared cartel leaders, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón).
Juan wants her help to transition into a woman and start a whole new life. Rita obliges, desperately in need of a change in her life as she’s working too hard to start a family, but the glass ceiling stops her from becoming her own boss. She sees that there’s nothing to lose and, perhaps projecting her own insecurities, becomes a champion for the crime boss.
Rita organises the sex change operation and moves Manitas’ two children and wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) to Switzerland. The catch is that Jessi and the children must never know about her surgery, believing Manitas to be dead. It’s all glossed over a little too satisfactorily, considering how important the surgery plays in the narrative.
Four years later, Manita (now going under the name Emilia Pérez) and Rita meet in a London restaurant. She has a new challenge for the lawyer; she wants her family back. The two women soon meet up to make a change in the world, finally finding their purpose. Inspired by a woman handing out flyers searching for her lost son, Pérez and Rita start a campaign to help find and identify the missing people let down by corrupt Mexican authorities.
Loosely adapted by writer-director Jacques Audiard (The Sisters Brothers) from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute, Emilia Pérez is at times too ambitious. The film wants to cover too many subjects and themes, and the true meaning becomes lost in the mix. Despite the switch in genres, the film mostly handles being part musical, part crime thriller smoothly.
The social justice element of Emilia Pérez and the songs that fit in that narrative are hugely moving. The social consciousness at the heart of the film keeps it from being too self-indulgent. The rousing musical numbers of women and children standing up and saying Enough while criminals repent are hugely effective. The lead’s trans storyline is sometimes too underplayed, considering it’s the catalyst to the entire movie, but is handled sympathetically, largely due to casting a trans actress in the role.
A last-minute addition to the narrative involving Jessi and her new partner, Gustav (Édgar Ramírez), is just one melodrama too many. Just one of these plots could have worked as the main story, let alone four or five of them. Despite the distracting third-act turn, the emotive ending feels like the right choice.
The music in Emilia Pérez isn’t exactly going to top the charts, ala The Greatest Showman (2017), but it works within the context of the film. Narrating the story sporadically, the soundtrack covers all genres, from operatic ballads to dancy-pop tunes and hip-hop segways. Rita’s angry songs about social change are the most successful, no doubt earning comparisons to Hamilton. Written by French singer Camille, the music smartly pushes along the narrative and lets the female characters express their inner rage in a society where they must sit quietly.
The cinematography by Damien Jalet, who worked on Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (2018), is vivid and modern. A highlight is the jaw-droppingly original ‘Vaginoplastia’, a song about gender reassignment surgery, which is accompanied by a Bigsby Berkley-style routine that takes place in a hospital.
Karla Sofía Gascón is a revelation as the eponymous character. Playing the role both before and after transitioning, the trans actress embodies the softness of a woman embarking on a new path, yet now and then, there’s a hint of menace that reminds the audience that she was once a fearsome crime boss. Zoe Saldaña (Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol.3) is at her career best as Rita; despite the lack of character depth, she commits to the musical scenes and mesmerizes during the hip-hop-inspired choreography.
Selena Gomez (Only Murders in the Building) struggles to match the power of her two co-stars. Not a native Spanish speaker like Saldaña and Gascón, her performance thus never feels as authentic as others. While she is a natural performer, her modern pop songs are some of the film’s most forgettable. Gomez’s performance is also not helped by the fact that the family drama is the most underwritten aspect of Emilia Pérez.
Emilia Pérez isn’t afraid to go all out, which should be commended. Holding back on narrative threads may have been beneficial to the effectiveness of the storytelling, but Audiard should be praised for using the musical genre to say something. This movie is original, makes a political statement, and looks like little else made today. Making a Latin crime thriller this moving and entertaining is no mean feat, even if it would have benefited from saying less.
FRANCE • BELGIUM | 2024 | 132 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | SPANISH • ENGLISH • FRENCH
director: Jacques Audiard.
writer: Jacques Audiard (based on his opera libretto, itself based on the novel ‘Écoute’ by Boris Razon).
starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir & Édgar Ramírez.