Emilia Pérez
It’s a brave director who would make a movie about the boss of a Mexican drug cartel who transitions to being a woman and develops a completely different personality. To add another layer of difficulty, Jacques Audiard has shot Emilia Pérez in Spanish and English, not his native French. If you’re already feeling giddy, take a deep breath: the film is also a musical.
Responses have been mixed, to say the least. The film has picked up awards galore, including the Jury Prize at Cannes, and the Best Actress award, which was split four ways. Yet The Guardian reported that Audiard has angered the Mexicans by ‘exploiting’ their unhappy record of organised crime and murder to make an “entertainment product”. He’s also angered the trans community for his portrayal of the lead character, although that may not qualify as much of a feat.
In both cases the criticisms seem to be generated by identity issues. His Mexican critics appear to believe that only Mexicans should be making films about crime and murder in their country. The trans crowd apparently think it’s outrageous that anyone who is not trans themselves should venture onto such a subject, although this didn’t seem to worry lead actor, Karla Sofía Gascón, who came out as trans in 2018. Being neither Mexican nor trans, I came to the film with no delicate sensitivities aching to be offended - and was blown away.
Love it or hate it, there’s never been a movie quite like Emilia Pérez. Audiard describes it as an “opera”, a term that captures some of the extravagant weirdness of a story that keeps throwing up shocks and surprises. To describe the plot is to give away a good number of these jolts, so I’ll keep my summaries brief and schematic.
The first character we meet is Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer in Mexico City who feels unvalued in her firm, where she covers for her incompetent and amoral bosses. She also feels disgust for the wealthy clients they represent, notably the current defendant who murdered his wife and is set to walk away a free man. What we’re not prepared for, is Rita bursting into song, belting out a hair-raising number about battered wives, “justice for sale”, violence and corruption.
Before we have gone very far down this road, Rita is kidnapped and taken to the camp of drug lord, Manitas Del Monte (Gascón), who makes her a startling proposition. If Rita can help this murderous kingpin realise his secret dream and become a woman, he’ll make her very rich. This entails flying to Bangkok and elsewhere to check out sexchange clinics, sounding out surgeons who sing songs about “vaginoplasty” and other medical miracles. She’s also required to arrange a new life in Switzerland for Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two children.
To complete his transition, Manitas has to disappear, allowing his family to believe he has been killed by rivals. Rita relocates to London, where she works for another big law firm, until she meets a wealthy Mexican woman named Emilia Pérez (Gascón), and realises she is looking into the eyes of the former gang leader.
From this point, Rita’s life becomes entangled with that of Emilia, who wants to move back to Mexico City and reunite with her family in the guise of a distant aunt. The change of gender has precipitated a revolutionary alteration in her personality, making her determined to seek salvation for her past evil deeds – with appropriate songs.
Although the subject matter of this film is immensely provocative, to get hung up on the Mexican or trans content may be missing the point. Emilia Pérez is an old-fashioned story of personal and spiritual redemption in which a great sinner seeks to make amends for his/her past misdeeds. Such stories often require a signal event to mark the moment of transformation. St. Paul had his moment of revelation on the road to Damascus when Jesus appeared to him in a blaze of light. After three days of blindness, he became a different man. Manitas finds his path to righteousness in an expensive clinic, where he emerges from multiple surgeries as a woman.
The drama and extremity of the transformation is a match for the violence of Manitas’s life as a drug baron. In changing his gender, he wants to believe he has changed his entire personality, but from time to time his old habits reassert themselves. We’re left to ponder that perennial question – you can change your appearance, even change your sexual identity, but can you change what’s within? Can a bad man become a good woman through a skilful application of the surgeon’s scalpel?
This argument comes up in the script, when the surgeon suggests that although he can change the body, one cannot change the soul. Rita replies: “Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.” That’s the thesis of Emilia Pérez in a nutshell, although it may be no more than wishful thinking, a prelude to a suitably dramatic last act.
Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón are both outstanding in their roles, in a story that feels like an elaborate allegory – a moral tale presented in the gloomy, grimy tones of down-at-heel realism, as we alternate between the poverty of Mexican life and the luxury lifestyle Emilia enjoys. In the recent Joker film, the songs only accentuated the misery of the lead character, bringing out everything that was sad and squalid. In this movie, the songs have an electrifying impact, ambushing us in moments of drama and tension. It's a tribute to the songwriting skills of Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais, who provided the original soundtrack.
I felt as if I was grabbed by this film in the first ten minutes and never allowed to slip free from its clutches. If I had to look for a category, it’s more melodrama than opera, but not one in which good and evil are placed in neat, opposing corners. Audiard seems to have made himself as many enemies as friends with this morally complex, violent and comical, utterly contemporary tale, but it may be the most original movie you’ll see this year.
Emilia Pérez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Written by Jacques Audiard, with Thomas Bidegan, Léa Mysius & Nicholas Livecchi, after a novel by Boris Razon
Starring: Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Mark Ivanir, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramírez, Eduardo Aladro, Emiliano Hasan
France/Belgium/Mexico, MA 15+, 132 mins