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.