Musical Crime Melodrama Emilia Pérez Sings, Then Sputters
The musical numbers in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez are jagged and unruly, exuberance bursting through the grit of its crime-movie surroundings. The title character (Karla Sofia Gascón) is a former drug cartel kingpin, reborn as a trans woman, though she doesn’t have many of the biggest or the best songs. Those belong to Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a frustrated defense lawyer enlisted (and paid handsomely) to facilitate Emila’s transition in secret. Years after her initial job has made her wealthy and successful, Rita is called back into service when Emilia returns to Mexico, hoping to reunite with her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and children, who (along with the rest of the world) presume her previous identity literally dead and buried, not just figuratively.
In one scene, the newly charitable Emilia speaks at a lavish gala, in a room full of bankers and government types, and Rita breaks into a furious song and dance, invisible to everyone else in the room, chastising them for their selfishness, shortsightedness, and ego. The song is catchy, in a staccato sort of way, and Saldaña, so often a figure of stoicism in various sci-fi pictures, performs the hell out of it, expressing her anger so physically that it nearly becomes joy, the camera ricocheting around her. The effect throws back to turn-of-the-century movie musicals that poked around in the genre during a low ebb in popularity: The melodrama-meets-fantasia experiment of Dancer in the Dark and (sorry) Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, where almost all of the actors did their own singing, regardless of technical ability.
The rest of Emilia Pérez is a throwback, too, because it’s essentially the plot of the 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire, if somewhat less convincing. I’m not being flip about Emilia’s transition, which seems to be genuinely motivated rather than a harebrained scheme, but direct about the movie’s ultimately bizarre aims. The idea that Emilia could use her personal transformation in an elaborate attempt to reset a morally compromised life is an interesting one – potentially provocative, empowering or thorny. Audiard seems up for any of those, until suddenly, he opts for none of the above. The movie would rather dither in its own melodrama than turn its characters into living, breathing people.
Most frustrating, Audiard has at his disposal a charismatic trio of women willing to do the work in and out of their songs, along with his own wild notions of how to stage them. (Audiard has adapted his own opera, in turn based loosely on a novel.) In what may be a nod to Gomez’s pop-star background, she gets a number framed as a lo-fi karaoke version of a music video, glorying in the new love she experiences after her husband’s death. When Rita researches transition options, doctors and nurses swirl around her; the music is not Busby Berkeley lush, lending the scene a pleasing discordance. They’re the most outwardly risky aspect of the movie, and the most consistently successful.
Yet the movie doesn’t leap along with them; it doesn’t start with an outlandish premise and imbue it with feeling, instead growing more ridiculous as it sputters along, the characters dragging their feet. Perhaps most bafflingly, Jessi recognizes almost nothing about Emilia and accepts her – more or less – as a long-lost cousin with a convenient fortune to house and protect her family. She’s had elaborate surgery, but certainly there’s something – her hands, her gait, the emerging growl of her worst threats when she’s unable to keep a lid on her monstrous previous self – that would raise her ex’s suspicion? Forget logic; isn’t that the more dramatic development? The more operatic one?
The promise of more music keeps the movie on life support when its drama threatens to flatline. When these sequences gradually recede from the movie, it feels as if someone should call an ambulance, but it’s also too late. What’s left are shadows of what might have been Saldaña and Gomez’s best on-screen performances, or Gascón’s breakthrough. Emilia Pérez implicitly promises a movie unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and technically, it delivers; I can’t think of another musical movie about Mexican drug cartels and trans issues, and certainly not one that has so little to say about either.
Director: Jacques Audiard
Writer: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez
Release Date: September 30, 2024 (New York Film Festival); November 1, 2024 (select theaters); November 13, 2024 (Netflix)