Emilia Perez review - Audiard's beguiling musical tribute to Mexico's women

A Mexican drugs cartel boss. A transitioning man. A strikingly beautiful woman lawyer risking all against corruption. Bittersweet songs that the characters suddenly break into, and occasionally dance to. A film in praise of women. And it’s not by Pedro Almodovar.

During lockdown, the French director Jacques Audiard concocted an opera with the French chanteuse Camille titled Emilia Pérez, after its main character, based on the 2018 novel Ecoute by Boris Razon. Now he’s turned it into a film musical, but one more like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg than anything MGM ever produced. There are few “numbers” in the conventional sense. The songs here are bursts of music used to give the characters a means to express the private emotions, from rage to secret love, that they daren’t or won’t voice any other way. The result is unexpectedly beguiling.

As with many Audiard films, reality is there, just one bad break away, as is redemption. Reality, for Rita (Zoe Saldaña, pictured below, right), a lowly unmarried lawyer, is seeing guilty men walk free, their money having bought them a jury that will rule a homicide a suicide. Her boss is inept as well as corrupt: why did she bother to get a law degree, she sings? When she is suddenly kidnapped on the street and hauled off to meet a cartel boss known as Manitas del Monte, her luck changes and suddenly her pay cheque ends in lots of zeroes. 

Manitas – who does indeed have small, delicate hands that seem out of whack with the jowly brute he has become – emerges as a familiar Audiard protagonist: a man with criminal tendencies who wants something better for himself and strives to achieve it. In his case, it’s to turn the page on his past and become a woman, something he claims to have dreamt of since he was a small boy. Rita will be his helper and confidante; even his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez, pictured left) and two children won’t be let into the secret for their own protection. 

How Rita copes with the woman her boss has become, posing as “Emilia Pérez”, a cousin of Manitas, forms the bulk of the film. Emilia is a tall, impeccably dressed woman unexpectedly haunted by the mothers of the “disappeared”, victims of the cartels’ violent activities. She starts a charity that helps them reunite with their loved ones’ corpses. Meanwhile, Jessi returns to Mexico City, and predictable complications arise, many of them comic, some poignant.

The heart of the film is provided by the trans Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón as Emilia: she and the other female leads (Saldaña, Gomez and Adriana Paz as Epifania, Emilia’s lover), jointly won the Best Actress prize at Cannes this year. Gascón radiates warmth and desire, embracing her new female role with good humour even when it is heartbreaking. Her love for her children never feels contrived, and her passion for remedying some of her misdeeds is sincere. Even so, when she is thwarted, she is transformed into a growling lion, her voice dropping from a falsetto to a bass-baritone, every inch the old cartel boss. 

Saldaña, too, has a great time, given a chance to show off her considerable dancing and singing skills, stomping along ahead of people protesting against violence towards women or corruption, climbing onto tables to howl in the faces of the rich, who don’t care about anybody else around them. She is often given cute makeshift backing choruses from the scene she’s in, from cleaners to nurses. The latter, at a Bangkok clinic she is checking out for Manitas, sing a winsome refrain that begins “Vaginaplasty, penoplasty…” with big smiles on their faces. It’s the general mood of the piece, upbeat and questioning. 

The lyrics to the vocal parts are a cut above, often sharp and witty, sometimes political and philosophical. The urbane surgeon Rita meets in Tel Aviv (Mark Ivanir) is a practical man who’s adamant that he can’t fix souls. He wishes her client would change his mind: “My door’s not God’s door”, but Rita sings forcefully back at him that changing the body changes society and the soul. The music’s response to the lyrics is a kaleidoscope of popular styles – mariachi, tango, rap – all delivered with flair and finesse. 

Gomez, in miniskirt and sparkly top, has a ball leading a raunchy posse of women singing about learning to love themselves; with her hair frazzled and dyed blonde, she is unrecognisable as the wholesome tweenage heroine of her past. As with the music, the choreography (by Damien Jalet) emerges seamlessly and never obtrusively. Even the semi-automatics get a dance routine as Emilia’s trusted cohort arm up to take on Jessi’s new amour, Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez).

The final sequence is a neat summation of the film’s odd emotional landscape, a scene of mass piety but with a sardonic twist. With luck, Audiard has an overdue hit on his hands.

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