Jacques Audiard has been directing movies for 30 years, often playing with genre— from the crime picture A Prophet to the romantic drama Rust and Bone to the western The Sisters Brothers— but I wish I could be more impressed by the supreme confidence with which he pulls off his most audacious feature to date, Emilia Pérez. A genre-bending Spanish-language film that is a musical, crime thriller, and telenovela-inspired drama in equal measure, it’s the kind of bold film that you sort of have to throw yourself into without hesitation. And yet, little about Emilia Pérez actually works: the form, the story, and most of all, the characters and the portrayal of trans identity.
The film— which is written by Audiard based on his opera libretto, which is in turn taken from part of a novel by Boris Razon— opens in Mexico, where Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is a lawyer whose career and personal life is going nowhere. Case in point: she just helped her skeevy boss, who can’t even remember his closing argument without being prompted, successfully defend a man who almost certainly killed his wife. It isn’t exactly gratifying work, so when Rita receives a mysterious phone call after the trial from a unknown person who recognizes her efforts and offers her a job, she takes the plunge— even if that means being kidnapped by Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a notorious cartel leader. Manitas’ request of her is surprising: she identifies as a woman, started hormone treatments two years ago, and wants Rita to find a surgeon to complete the transition, fake her death, and set up her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two sons in a safe and secure place so she can live as her authentic self, in exchange for the sort of wealth that would also allow Rita to live a fulfilling life. That set-up sounds like it would comprise the entirety of the rest of the film, but it actually only makes up a little under the first half. What seems like risky business— making a high-profile criminal disappear while safe-guarding the ones she loves most— actually goes off without a hitch. Four years later, Jessi and the kids reside in Switzerland, while the now-rich Rita thrives in London. Rita is relieved to receive the rare opportunity to speak Spanish with a Mexican woman named Emilia she meets around a crowded table at a posh restaurant, only to be almost immediately shocked by the realization that Emilia is Manitas. The astute Rita also instantly knows that this encounter didn’t happen by chance; Emilia wants her family back with her, and needs to rehire Rita to make that happen.
The remainder of Emilia Pérez unfolds in a mix of threads that individually may have been beguiling, had they been fully realized and not conveyed in such a garish style. On a surface level, there’s something truly lovely and human about how these three women— later four, as Adriana Paz briefly joins the group as Emilia’s new lover Epifanía— interact and support each other. The shades of melodrama, with a touch of light comedy, come into play as Emilia adjusts to a new life with her former wife and children, Rita remaining the only person who knows who she used to be. Emilia’s gentle prodding of Jessi about her current love life and her previous relationship with her spouse was met with giggles at my screening (a packed crowd for the closing night of the Heartland International Film Festival), but Gascón reacts with just the right touch of melancholy about what was and what could have been. Accompanying Emilia’s new body is a new outlook on life: a chance encounter at a restaurant with a woman searching for her long-missing son prompts Emilia, aided by Rita’s knowledge of the justice system, to kick-start an organization locating the missing— disappearances in Mexico are practically an epidemic, the ineptitude of the government and local law enforcement prompting many families to take matters into their own hands— and bring their loved ones closure. These two tangents come to a head as the film heads toward its tense climax, Emilia’s rising prominence as a public figure— this time, one who is admired rather than reviled— butting up against her inability to hold on to her family.
The cast is operating at the top of their game: Paz and Gomez bring very different but memorable energies to their supporting roles, and Gascón, as mentioned before, is quite revelatory. Saldana— so often seen lately as an ensemble member in big budget Hollywood action movies— gets the chance to stretch some different muscles here. Stripped down at the start to a dowdy, shapeless business wardrobe, sans makeup, she comes onto the scene fresh and fearless, and the center of not only numerous dramatic moments, but most of the music numbers, throwing herself wholeheartedly into performing the songs and the rigid choreography.
However, every other element of Emilia Pérez fails to match the talents of its cast; in fact, it lets them down. Despite the actors’ efforts to inject some real human emotions into their performances, these are archetypes, not people. The lopsided structure of the narrative— focusing predominantly on Rita initially before largely sidelining her in favor of Emilia— doesn’t do it any favors. Their dialogue gestures toward their desires and disappointments in love, family, and work, but the story doesn’t follow through. In fact, the abrupt “resolution” to this tangle of relationships isn’t merely unsatisfying— it’s cruel. Emilia’s swing toward a redemptive arc in the years following her transition is just as head-scratchingly abrupt in a way that weirdly equates male traits with evil qualities and female traits with goodness, the topical inclusion of Mexico’s missing persons serving more as window dressing for the lead characters to play with rather than tackling the subject with any sort of introspection or nuance, while outright ignoring Emilia’s contributions to said issue as Manitas. I’m admittedly not the right person to comment on this film’s success as a trans narrative, but the way that Emilia Pérez treats gender-affirming surgery as something otherworldly— namely through Rita’s shocked reactions to Emilia’s body and an irritating music number at a hospital that finds her belting out “I want to learn about the sex change operation” while bandaged patients swirl around her in their beds, the kaleidoscopic overhead shots serving as a perverse inversion of a Busby Berkeley musical. Berkeley’s musicals— the bulk of his output spanned the early 1930s through the start of the 40s— are splashy and fun and visually striking, particularly in how he utilized the human body as set pieces. Emilia Pérez, on the other hand, often seems as if it wants to be anything but a musical. Clément Ducol’s score and French singer Camille’s original songs are grating (it doesn’t help that virtually none of the onscreen performers are capital S singers) and awkwardly placed at sporadic moments throughout the film. The proximity of the release dates of the two films reminded me of another recent movie musical that seemed as if it was trying to be as unpleasant as possible: Todd Phillips’ Joker Folie à deux, which explicitly referenced several big song-and-dance Old Hollywood musicals while actively avoiding mirroring their technique in the filmmaking. Furthermore, characters in Emilia Pérez are often grotesquely lit, while Audiard’s affinity for zooms and the frequent cuts in the editing lead to the feeling of too-muchness. There’s one split-screen scene late in the film in which Rita is on the phone talking to both Emilia and Jessi. The cuts and zooms within each segment of the frame aren’t an arresting visual; it just makes it hard to know where and what to look at. Then again, there isn’t a lot in Emilia Pérez— an unenjoyable work whose offenses only pile up the more I sit with it—that’s worth looking at to begin with.
Emilia Pérez opens in select theaters on November 1, and will be available to stream on Netflix beginning on November 13. Runtime:
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