From the first frames of Emilia Pérez, writer-director Jacques Audiard (Dheepan, Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) makes it clear this is going to be a musical. Not a backstage-style musical where the numbers take place in a performance context, nor a classic Broadway-to-Hollywood musical, where characters erupt into song only at moments of heightened emotion. Here, the songs seem to emerge from the landscape that surrounds the characters, even before we meet them: A long aerial shot of Mexico City by night echoes with an eerie multivocal chant. This turns out to be the combined voices of the city’s junk salesmen, patrolling the streets with speaker trucks asking for used appliances. Later, the repetitive thrumming of tires on a highway will morph into a character’s staccato plea for recognition and self-transformation—what, in a more conventional musical, would be called their “I want” song.
Audiard initially envisioned Emilia Pérez, based on one chapter of the 2018 novel Écoute by the French author Boris Razon, as an opera, and the flamboyant theatricality of the resulting movie attests to those origins. Emilia Pérez features not just one but three divas, each of whom gets more than one extended aria in which to express her outsize emotions: anger, longing, fulfillment, frustration, desire. In just over two hours, this movie covers a span of events that take place over five or so years across multiple continents. The story, part crime caper, part domestic melodrama, part meditation on the mystery of selfhood, will involve suspense, disguised identity, the search for redemption, tragic hubris—a full complement of themes from genres as divergent as film noir and the kind of three-hankie weepies once known as “women’s movies.”
Though Emilia Pérez is not a movie intended only for female audiences, it’s one that reflects deeply on the embodied experience of being a woman, a condition that some characters endure as a form of imprisonment—one unhappily kept wife sings of her life in the proverbial “golden cage”—while others look to womanhood as a potential site for personal and societal reinvention. As the transgender heroine (or is she an antiheroine?) of the title, the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón (a trans performer who first achieved fame in her native country prior to her transition) gives one of the most transformative and moving performances of the year, creating a character so capacious and so rife with contradictions that it’s possible to find her at once admirable and irredeemable. Gascón’s powerful central presence illuminates rather than outshining some stellar supporting work from Zoe Saldaña, revealing whole new sides of herself as a singer and dancer, and Selena Gomez, who invests her melancholy mob-wife character with flashes of scabrous humor and a self-sabotaging streak of cruelty.
The entire first act of Emilia Pérez centers not on the title character but on Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a criminal defense attorney at a high-profile firm in Mexico City. When her sexist boss, who relies heavily on her preparation to win his cases, succeeds in keeping a wealthy wife-murderer out of prison, Rita sings out her rage about working for the bad guys in a savage diss track over a chorus of cleaning ladies. But someone even worse is about to call her up with a proposition. The notorious cartel leader known as Manitas Del Monte (Gascón) wants to hire her, offering more money than she’s ever conceived of making in exchange for Rita’s help in carrying out a top-secret plan: Manitas wants to fake her own death and have extensive gender-affirming surgery so she can live as the woman she’s always felt herself to be.
From the first frames of Emilia Pérez, writer-director Jacques Audiard (Dheepan, Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) makes it clear this is going to be a musical. Not a backstage-style musical where the numbers take place in a performance context, nor a classic Broadway-to-Hollywood musical, where characters erupt into song only at moments of heightened emotion. Here, the songs seem to emerge from the landscape that surrounds the characters, even before we meet them: A long aerial shot of Mexico City by night echoes with an eerie multivocal chant. This turns out to be the combined voices of the city’s junk salesmen, patrolling the streets with speaker trucks asking for used appliances. Later, the repetitive thrumming of tires on a highway will morph into a character’s staccato plea for recognition and self-transformation—what, in a more conventional musical, would be called their “I want” song.
Audiard initially envisioned Emilia Pérez, based on one chapter of the 2018 novel Écoute by the French author Boris Razon, as an opera, and the flamboyant theatricality of the resulting movie attests to those origins. Emilia Pérez features not just one but three divas, each of whom gets more than one extended aria in which to express her outsize emotions: anger, longing, fulfillment, frustration, desire. In just over two hours, this movie covers a span of events that take place over five or so years across multiple continents. The story, part crime caper, part domestic melodrama, part meditation on the mystery of selfhood, will involve suspense, disguised identity, the search for redemption, tragic hubris—a full complement of themes from genres as divergent as film noir and the kind of three-hankie weepies once known as “women’s movies.”
The entire first act of Emilia Pérez centers not on the title character but on Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a criminal defense attorney at a high-profile firm in Mexico City. When her sexist boss, who relies heavily on her preparation to win his cases, succeeds in keeping a wealthy wife-murderer out of prison, Rita sings out her rage about working for the bad guys in a savage diss track over a chorus of cleaning ladies. But someone even worse is about to call her up with a proposition. The notorious cartel leader known as Manitas Del Monte (Gascón) wants to hire her, offering more money than she’s ever conceived of making in exchange for Rita’s help in carrying out a top-secret plan: Manitas wants to fake her own death and have extensive gender-affirming surgery so she can live as the woman she’s always felt herself to be.
Act One ends with Manitas’ transition and the emergence of Emilia, whose self-naming we witness as she prepares to leave her hospital room and rejoin the world. I won’t give away much about the plot after this point, because one of this film’s greatest strengths is its loopy confidence in its own unpredictable unfolding. Let’s leave it at this: Emilia, whose elegant high-femme self-presentation makes her truly unrecognizable as the macho gangster she once appeared to be, insinuates herself back into the lives of her wife and children, claiming to be Manitas’ wealthy cousin. Rita, too, finds herself drawn into the family’s life as Emilia’s partner in a new enterprise, a charity organization that attempts to reverse some of the harms perpetrated by Emilia in her secret criminal past. In the process, Emilia meets an abused widow, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), and falls in love, while Jessi picks up with an old flame (Édgar Ramírez) whose entry onto the scene takes the story into the south-of-the-border noir territory it’s been circling all along.
The songs, by the French composing team Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais, aren’t exactly the kind you come out tapping your toe to—they’re discursive and highly plot-specific, not unlike the use of music in Leos Carax’s memorably bizarre Annette a few years back. But in their performance contexts—which can range from huge choreographed crowd scenes to an intimate duet as Emilia and her young son say goodnight at bedtime—the songs make perfect dramatic sense, and offer opportunities for no-holds-barred delivery from a killer ensemble.
In a showstopper of a number performed at a lavish charity event in Mexico City, Saldaña dances on tabletops in a red velvet power suit while delivering a scathing (yet sexy!) critique of the country’s corrupt ruling class. Selena Gomez gets only one big solo song (plus a pair of duets and a song over the closing credits), but the script gives her plenty of opportunities to make what could have been a stereotypical gangster’s moll into someone far trickier and more complex. Still, it’s Gascón whose bottomless charisma carries the movie, even over some of its rockier tonal transitions. This is a performance that will be talked about for best actress awards—she’s already considered a favorite for the Oscar, behind only Anora’s Mikey Madison—and it should be. Gascón manages to create two entirely distinct personas, complete with their own singing voices, for her pre- and post-transition selves, and using her voice and face alone, she shows us how alienated the Manitas we first meet feels in and from her own body.
Audiard initially envisioned Emilia Pérez, based on one chapter of the 2018 novel Écoute by the French author Boris Razon, as an opera, and the flamboyant theatricality of the resulting movie attests to those origins. Emilia Pérez features not just one but three divas, each of whom gets more than one extended aria in which to express her outsize emotions: anger, longing, fulfillment, frustration, desire. In just over two hours, this movie covers a span of events that take place over five or so years across multiple continents. The story, part crime caper, part domestic melodrama, part meditation on the mystery of selfhood, will involve suspense, disguised identity, the search for redemption, tragic hubris—a full complement of themes from genres as divergent as film noir and the kind of three-hankie weepies once known as “women’s movies.”
The entire first act of Emilia Pérez centers not on the title character but on Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a criminal defense attorney at a high-profile firm in Mexico City. When her sexist boss, who relies heavily on her preparation to win his cases, succeeds in keeping a wealthy wife-murderer out of prison, Rita sings out her rage about working for the bad guys in a savage diss track over a chorus of cleaning ladies. But someone even worse is about to call her up with a proposition. The notorious cartel leader known as Manitas Del Monte (Gascón) wants to hire her, offering more money than she’s ever conceived of making in exchange for Rita’s help in carrying out a top-secret plan: Manitas wants to fake her own death and have extensive gender-affirming surgery so she can live as the woman she’s always felt herself to be.
Act One ends with Manitas’ transition and the emergence of Emilia, whose self-naming we witness as she prepares to leave her hospital room and rejoin the world. I won’t give away much about the plot after this point, because one of this film’s greatest strengths is its loopy confidence in its own unpredictable unfolding. Let’s leave it at this: Emilia, whose elegant high-femme self-presentation makes her truly unrecognizable as the macho gangster she once appeared to be, insinuates herself back into the lives of her wife and children, claiming to be Manitas’ wealthy cousin. Rita, too, finds herself drawn into the family’s life as Emilia’s partner in a new enterprise, a charity organization that attempts to reverse some of the harms perpetrated by Emilia in her secret criminal past. In the process, Emilia meets an abused widow, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), and falls in love, while Jessi picks up with an old flame (Édgar Ramírez) whose entry onto the scene takes the story into the south-of-the-border noir territory it’s been circling all along.
The songs, by the French composing team Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais, aren’t exactly the kind you come out tapping your toe to—they’re discursive and highly plot-specific, not unlike the use of music in Leos Carax’s memorably bizarre Annette a few years back. But in their performance contexts—which can range from huge choreographed crowd scenes to an intimate duet as Emilia and her young son say goodnight at bedtime—the songs make perfect dramatic sense, and offer opportunities for no-holds-barred delivery from a killer ensemble.
Source: By Dana Stevens for SLATE