EMILIA PÉREZ
2024 | Dir. Jacques Audiard | 132 Minutes
"Changing the soul changes society, changing society changes it all."
A Mexican cartel boss coerces struggling lawyer Rita Mora Castro for assistance to secretly arrange gender-affirming surgery and begin a new life. Years later, the former kingpin Emilia Pérez needs Rita's help again, requesting to reconnect with her family while taking on the false identity of an estranged relative. Returning to Mexico, Emilia uses the her wealth to help families victimized by gang violence, but the sins of her vicious past inevitably collide with her altruistic present.
Adapted from a portion of Boris Razon's 2018 novel Écoute, writer/director Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez is ostensibly a bold and daring musical about how the transformation of one person may change the world, but the evident lack of care the film has for handling its subject matter destroys any sense of emotional earnestness that's essential for this type of story to work. Centered around a transgender protagonist, the narrative leans hard into tired outdated plot tropes for queer people, the worst of which is the character's nonsensical decision to totally abandon her family as a part of her transition only for her to reconnect with them through underhanded deceptive means. The narrative seemingly takes on more poignant aspects in the second act as Emilia establishes a nonprofit organization to help bring closure to families who had fallen victim to cartel violence, but things quickly go off the rails and the film turns into a clumsy pseudo-telenovela pastiche involving romantic affairs and custody battles, offering little in the way of either amusement or catharsis. The feature comes off as cheap and disingenuous, stripping away any meaning from the marginalized peoples it chooses to focus on, rendering them mere aesthetic choices utilized in questionable taste.
Stylistically on an overall level, Emilia Pérez is more visually garish than appealing. The elaborate dance choreography is consistently hamstrung by some truly off-putting lyrics in the featured songs, making many of the musical numbers a real chore to sit through save for a handful of highlights. "La Vaginoplastia" with its lyrics listing away various gender-affirming surgical procedures kicks off amusingly enough but quickly overstays its welcome, and "El Amor" with Emilia contemplating how she is "half him, half her, half kingpin, half queen" before segueing into a poorly-written ballad about "making love with love" is confounding bad. "Para," highlighting the good work of Emilia's nonprofit through the point of view of the families and its ex-criminal volunteers seeking redemption is one of the few songs with genuinely poignant moments, while the rap-rock number "El Mal" with Rita expressing her anger over the misdeeds of the nonprofit's most prominent donors is the only sequence that somewhat convincingly strikes an engaging defiant punk rock tone.
As the titular lead, Karla Sofía Gascón delivers a serviceably compelling performance despite the shortcomings of the screenplay. Zoe Saldaña demonstrates maximum effort as Emilia's put-upon lawyer Rita, showing off impressive skills in the most physically demanding role of the film. The supporting cast includes Selena Gomez looking and sounding out-of-place as Emilia's ex-wife Jessi, Adriana Paz in a mostly thankless part of Emilia's love interest Epifanía, and Édgar Ramírez as Jessi's lover Gustavo who hardly registers as a character until the plot calls for an unimaginative car crash finale.
On paper, Emilia Pérez is a rather simplistic tale of change, love, and redemption. In execution, the film is a bafflingly misguided movie musical that fumbles its depiction of transgender people and the plight of the victims of cartel violence. The picture is a bizarre curiosity at best, a harmfully inauthentic representation of real world struggles at worst. Principal players Gascón and Saldaña show impressive commitment to their respective roles, but the dialogue and the musical numbers, ranging in quality and tone from awkwardly campy to downright awful, all but undermine their work. The topical issues the production utilizes as set dressing deserve much more thoughtful treatment than this.
FRAGMENTS
- Props to the filmmakers for casting a trans woman to play a trans woman, but not like this, not like this
- The comparisons between this and Mrs. Doubtfire are hilarious, but also sadly quite accurate
- I found the way the dialogue casually deadnames and misgenders Emilia particularly jarring
- Much has been said by others more qualified than I am regarding the mish-mash of the cast's non-Mexican accents, with particular criticism directed towards Selena Gomez's Spanish -- as a Cantonese-speaker subjected to all manner of bad Chinese in American and European cinema, I totally empathize
MCU CONNECTIONS
- Zoe Saldaña (Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3)
