The movie musical could use a radical reimagining, and Jacques Audiard gives it his best shot with Emilia Pérez, an unconventional mixture of crime picture, soap opera, heartwarming fable, and song-and-dance showstopper. His ambition, however, outpaces his execution, as his extravaganza’s disparate styles clash more than they cohere, undermining a story that requires either greater realism or fantasticality. Despite winning the Best Actress (for its female ensemble) and Jury Prize awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a bold gamble that doesn’t quite pay off.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its Nov. 1 theatrical bow and Nov. 13 Netflix debut, Emilia Pérez boasts flair from the beginning, with Mexico City lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) crooning her frustrations with her latest case—involving a man she must defend from charges that he murdered his wife—and the love and violence that dominate the city. Her opening statements recited in court (poorly) by her boss, Rita is desperate for a change. Thus, when she receives a mysterious phone call promising her riches if she attends a meeting at a nearby newsstand (its papers plastered with images of sex and corpses), she seizes the opportunity.
For her courage, Rita is kidnapped and brought to a trailer that’s the home base of Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the country’s reigning drug cartel kingpin. Juan’s proposition is this: for millions in an offshore account, Rita must facilitate his gender reassignment surgery and spirit his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and young children to Switzerland, where they’ll be safe from his enemies after he fakes his death. Rita accepts and embarks on a search for a surgeon willing to transform Juan. In Tel Aviv, she finds one, Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), and the scheme goes off without a hitch, granting Juan a new identity and reality as Emilia Pérez.
Audiard’s opening musical set piece in a Mexico City marketplace has a forceful dynamism marked by spiky choreography and fluid cinematography; throughout the (primarily Spanish-language) film, his camera swoops, lunges, and glides in harmony with his protagonists. As early as Rita’s visit to a Bangkok clinic, though, Emilia Pérez’s songs prove flat and perfunctory, expressing the characters’ feelings via blunt lyrics and forgettable melodies. Quite simply, an endeavor such as this needs far better compositions than Camille and Clément Ducol provide. Consequently, at the very moments the material should soar, it goes limp, and that’s especially true in its back end, when the writer/director more or less does away with dancing in favor of ho-hum sing-talking.
Four years after her metamorphosis, Emilia reemerges in Rita’s life, much to the attorney’s surprise and fear. She has nothing to worry about, since Emilia requires her services for a daring task: bringing her children and wife to live with her in Mexico City under the pretense that she’s one of Juan’s distant cousins. Maintaining this ruse, however, is difficult for Emilia, who greets her kids with excessive hugs and kisses. She also pries into the romantic proclivities of Jessi, who has a lover (Édgar Ramírez) with whom she’s eager to reconnect. At this point, Emilia Pérez segues into more telenovela territory. As with its initial action, though, it refuses to commit to being wholly juicy and sensational, or deeply serious and tormented, which leaves it unsuccessful in both regards.
Free of the terrible make-up she was forced to act through as Juan, Gascón shines radiantly as Emilia, who decides, due to an encounter with a grieving mother, to do something about the scourge of missing people that, in her prior life, she was instrumental in creating. This development is an extension of the film’s guiding idea that remaking the body is the first step to revolutionizing the country and the soul. Yet because Audiard operates in a middle-ground between outlandish fairy tale and grim drama—thereby denying us escapist pleasure or moving gravity—his plot just comes across as ludicrous. So too does Emilia, a reborn monster whose horrible cartel past hangs awkwardly over the redemptive proceedings.
Rita and Jessi aren’t quite as burdened by the narrative’s illogicalities (such as Emilia thinking she can take on her former compatriots without concern for reprisals), and Saldaña and Gomez’s compelling performances compensate for their characters’ general thinness. Gomez is particularly magnetic when granted the opportunity, as during a bedroom musical number that shakes with fury and moves seamlessly between the real and the unreal. No matter the wild tonal shifts, Emilia Pérez’s actresses articulate the film’s medley of confusion, guilt, and desire. Audiard treats them with empathy and grants each time in the spotlight, and his formal dexterity is often striking, whether he’s affixing his camera to the wheel of a car and the hip of a young bicyclist, or he’s superimposing glittering stars over Emilia’s face as she shares a tender bedtime moment with her daughter.
Audiard’s script, unfortunately, isn’t as agile as it tries to be, and that becomes most apparent after Jessi’s plans for the future conflict with Emilia’s idea about a potential happily-ever-after, causing her old, terrible self to briefly resurface. From there, anger and resentment beget disastrous decisions, hurtling Emilia Pérez into standoffs and shootouts that resemble pale imitations of the movies upon which they’re modeled. The director wants his latest to be a genre pastiche tethered together by emotion and music, but he sidelines the last of those to the film’s detriment.
Worse, he wraps things up in underwhelming fashion, thereby squandering a chance for the sort of effusively passionate finale that such a work demands. In light of this misstep, a coda in which women—led by Emilia’s lover Epifanía (Adriana Paz)—march in the street praising Emilia as a saint plays like misplaced deification.
Emilia Pérez home run swings are responsible for its sentimental highs and its uneven lows, and there’s something to be said about an acclaimed artist holding nothing back by producing a sincere trans musical celebration of feminine agency—which doubles, ultimately, as a lament about the difficulty of true transformation. Admiring the effort, alas, doesn’t make the fragmentary finished product any more cohesive.
