The first musical number of Emilia Pérez hits like a tonal tsunami. Up to that point, which is really just a few minutes in, the movie bears the (somewhat problematic) aesthetics and hallmarks of a gritty Mexican drama, possibly revolving around a corrupt legal system. When Zoe Saldaña and all the meandering townspeople around her break into bombastic song and dance, the movie sets clear its wholly different stylistic intentions. A combining of the dramatic realism of a crime movie with the hyper stylization of an operatic musical. Director Jacques Audiard initially wrote the story as a libretto, before adapting it to a movie. And for retaining all of the requisite grand emotions, melodrama and action, not to mention the somewhat epic scope and context, Emilia Pérez is one of the most authentically opera-like movies I’ve ever seen.
It also happens to be a movie that wears its audacity on its sleeve, sometimes to a fault -with a most unique and intriguing premise. Based loosely on a throwaway subplot in a novel (Écoute by Boris Razon) that Audiard thought deserved significant expansion, it tells the story of a lawyer in Mexico who is recruited to assist the powerful leader of a drug cartel in undergoing gender reassignment, faking their death so as to start a new life -the narrative ultimately following both this journey and its consequences in the years afterwards.
Saldaña plays the attorney Rita, disillusioned by the work she does, pressured into the employ and a tentative friendship with the cartel boss. Karla Sofía Gascón plays that boss, the titular Emilia Pérez who after transitioning lives a fairly comfortable, nondescript life for a time. Selena Gomez plays Emilia’s former wife Jessi engaged in an affair with another gang leader. And Adriana Paz plays Epifanía, a cartel widow who becomes Emilia’s new love interest. Collectively, these four women won the Best Actress Award at Cannes this year -a symbol of the significance they each play in the story and as related to one another (this has happened a few times at Cannes, most recently the cast of Almodóvar’s Volver in 2006). And indeed all of the relationships of these characters are vital, the actresses giving very good performances in both the drama and musical elements, though Gascón is the particular stand-out. She (and also Saldaña in some sequences) carries the movie through its wildness and spontaneity -a perfect fit for both the bigness of the movie’s tone (she’s quite a formidable and impassioned singer) and its necessary beats of reigned-in quiet emotions. She avoids a lot of easy characterization, is complex and even self-defeating, but she never loses her gusto or sheer screen presence.
Whether Audiard adapts the film to that sensibility or conjures it in Gascón for its particular style, he does well in that mould that is a contrast to his more grounded movies like Rust and Bone and Dheepan. The premise itself is very out there, to say nothing of the drama that follows where Emilia poses as a distant aunt taking in her late husband’s family as a way of being closer to her children (it’s Mrs. Doubtfire-adjacent which feels a tad uncomfortable given she is an actual trans woman). The real bombast comes out of the songs though, and Audiard is clearly very excited to be shooting musical sequences, his camera spinning in time with the choreography, usually centring the lead singer of the scene and always with an intimacy that pulls it from the movie’s more structured reality and, in the case of Emilia, often emphasizes the emotional intensity of her feelings and convictions. The songs, even with back-up singers, are mostly soliloquies, though in a hyper-energized style -particularly those of Saldaña, who, already performing the movie entirely in Spanish for the first time, shows yet more range and fun in her complete dominance of cinematically complex, lyrically intense sequences such as “Todo y nada” -where she reflects on the state of her career, and “El mal” -where she lambastes the politically corrupt, this latter perhaps the movie’s biggest musical stand-out. For Gascón, "Por casualidad" -when Emilia confronts Rita in London, and "El amor" -about her blossoming relationship with Epifanía, are the strongest outings.
Of course in spite of its exuberance, Emilia Pérez does aspire to genuine drama and a somewhat honest portrait of its world and issues, which does make for some moments of real tonal whiplash. A movie that features a Malaysian doctor singing about bottom surgery is also a movie that tries to talk seriously (through song) about cartel murders. On the subject of the drug cartels, it is a fairly laissez-faire depiction that betrays a French filmmaker attempting to tell a Mexican story in broad and somewhat stereotypical terms. Indeed the Mexico of this movie does not exist beyond the seedy underground of the city's pale institutions and impoverished areas, and the serene country isolation of Emilia's estate -though itself not beyond those clutches.
The drama and self-seriousness of the film also feels at times exaggerated, emphasized by some of Emilia's actions which strain her otherwise sympathetic journey. There is some selfishness that is never reckoned with -even in song- around her abandoning her family when faking her death and then claiming ownership of her children from Jessi. And her reformed crusade against the cartels, working to undermine the very organization she led and profited off of for so long, is under-examined. There is again little accountability for her on this front, the conflict of the climax being downright petty by comparison.
And so I can see how the movie would be read as either downplaying or excusing the actions of violent drug cartels; or just casting them broadly as invariably ensconced in Mexico's cultural fabric. Audiard invites his audience not to take certain swaths of the movie seriously through his feverish style yet plays up the drama's severity elsewhere. The movie has a hard time tonally coalescing, but it is quite entertaining and spontaneous all throughout. And I think the boisterous music, performances and filmmaking are enough to carry it through. Operating at its best, the movie is a rush, and in that same beautifully anarchic spirit (though not as successful) as the like of Holy Motors and The Lure. Ultimately, Emilia Pérez is as strange, delightful, and complicated as its titular figure.
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