"Emilia Pérez" is an odd movie. And the more I learned about the movie, the odder it got. This is a Spanish language musical about a transgender Mexican drug cartel leader, Manitas, who secretly transitions and creates a new persona - Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón). All the creatives behind it are French. The writer and director is Jacques Audiard, who won the Palme d'Or a few years ago for the Tamil language film "Dheepan," but mostly works in his native language. French singer Camille wrote the songs. The fabulous costumes came from a Yves Saint Laurent designer. Everything about the movie strikes me as very French, despite three Spanish speaking leading ladies being given the opportunity to shine. I understand why it's gotten some raves, because it goes very big and the performances are all very impassioned and melodramatic. However, I've historically had some difficulty with French cinema, and could not wrap my head around this.
My first thought was that "Emilia Pérez" simply reeked of inauthenticity, both as a film about Mexican characters and as a transgender narrative - and boy have there been plenty of transgender narratives in film this year to compare against. However, "Emilia Pérez" is a musical, and also arguably taking place in the heightened world of telenovelas - the famously melodramatic Latin American soap operas. Karla Sofía Gascón is a veteran of the genre, having spent much of her early career in Mexico. The unlikely plot, involving multiple twists and turns, mistaken identities, and the past coming back to haunt everyone, are familiar components of this kind of storytelling. I'm not saying that the film should be forgiven for its glib portrayal of gender transitioning, or its simplistic take on Mexico, but I think the choices make more sense in this context. "Emilia Pérez" is a fantasy, and some exaggerations are to be expected.
The best thing about the film is unquestionably the performances. Zoe Saldaña made the movie for me as Rita Mora Castro, an Afro-Latina lawyer who Emilia hires in secret to facilitate her transition. Saldaña gets to sing and dance and rage and take charge of the screen in a way that she doesn't get to often enough. Selena Gomez has a more limited role as Manitas's abandoned wife Jessi, a wronged woman who is expected to put up with far too much. I like her very much as an actress, but she feels a bit miscast, despite nailing her song numbers. As for Karla Sofía Gascón, she does what she can, but the character of Emilia Pérez is constructed of such disparate parts that often seem to be working against each other. The whole plot is predicated on Emilia becoming a saintly figure through her transition, but gradually being undone by her inability to cut ties with her past. However, Manitas and Emilia feel like entirely different people, and it was a mistake to not give Emilia any sign of internal life pre-transition. Gascón has a wonderful presence, but ends up coming across as more of a caricature or icon than a full-blooded human being.
"Emilia Pérez" feels similar to "Annette," the Leos Carax musical with a similarly outlandish story that works best if you treat it as allegory. A major problem I have with both is not liking the music at all. In the case of "Emilia Pérez," it's entirely due to the style of the songs, which are mostly very internal and angst-ridden. The language barrier is an issue for me, as is the total lack of any earworms. I wonder if this would work better as a stage musical, since the plot is so disjointed and the ending is so abrupt. I haven't yet mentioned an entire subplot involving Emilia falling in love with the widow of a man she killed, because it goes absolutely nowhere and I don't understand why it's in the film, except to give Adriana Paz a role. Some of the fundamental construction of the story and music here is so lacking, it comes across as downright amateurish. I don't speak Spanish, but there have been some significant complaints circulating about the misuse of dialects and local vernacular too.
I'm left wondering why on earth Jacques Audiard and his collaborators decided to make this film - about this subject matter, in this language, and in this format. Audiard is a fine director, and I respect his commitment to showing us the human condition in many different forms, but this was clearly biting off way more than he could chew. I'm not disappointed, really. Just very puzzled and a little at a loss for words.
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