On paper, Emilia Perez is one of the oddest pitches in recent years; French director Jacques Audiard directs a Spanish-language musical set in Mexico City about a cartel boss who retires from his crime empire and undergoes a sex-change operation in order to live as a woman in hiding from her enemies. Could this wild mish-mash possibly work? The early word from its premiere at Cannes was a pretty enthusiastic ‘yes’, winning some rave reviews and a couple of prizes at the festival. Now that it’s finally arrived in UK cinemas, though, I’m sad to say that, for me at least, the answer to the question is a solid ‘no’. Though there is plenty of ambition to admire here, the result of Audiard taking so many big swings is that he misses almost all of them.
Trans actress Karla Sofia Gascon plays the boss in both guises – initially as a man, named Manitas Del Monte, and then as the titular Emilia Perez. It’s a truly original role in an undeniably truly original story as Manitas hires the highly capable but undervalued lawyer Rita Castro (Zoe Saldana) to find a surgeon to turn him into Emilia, before reuniting with Rita as Emilia four years later in an attempt to find redemption through serving Mexico’s grieving communities.
Also pulled into the orbit of this tale is the young and beautiful Jessi (Selena Gomez), Manitas’s girlfriend and the mother of his children who is led to believe that Manitas is dead before being quasi-adopted by Emilia, who claims to be Manitas’s distant cousin, all while Jessi chases her own romance with the volatile Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). All the film’s lead actresses shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes and while that does make some sense – they’re all forceful and charismatic in difficult-looking roles – none of them are able to elevate the material enough to make it really convince.
Audiard and his regular writing collaborator Thomas Bidegain are here loosely adapting a French novel called Ecoute by Boris Razon, which makes the Mexico City setting that much more confusing – the original book is set in Audiard’s native Paris, which was the backdrop for his wonderful last film Paris 13th District. There’s a central failure within a lot of the story here to really get to grips with the crisis of cartels, kidnappings, and senseless violence that forms the backdrop, which means when Audiard finally pays it proper attention in the finale, the grand climax feels like a rather unearned cop-out.
The songs themselves are just as much of a mixed bag – for every one that is genuinely stirring (e.g. ‘Aqui Estoy’, a soulful and uniquely minimalist choral ballad that hands the spotlight over to the Mexican public in a moving manner) there are about three that are just downright embarrassing to watch and listen to. Of the main actresses, only Gomez (naturally) can really *sing*, and her centrepiece number ‘Mi Camino’ is the best song in the film, but even she gets stuck with some duds – her first outing is a raspy, punky number that doesn’t play to her strengths at all.
Whilst I am generally an apologist for flawed films that really aim for something new (hello, Megalopolis), there’s a creeping air of smugness to Emilia Perez. One scene in particular, featuring a genuinely awful song about trans surgeries and pronouns all within an Israeli doctor’s office in Tel Aviv, feels so smirkingly designed as an empty ‘that’ll offend *everyone*’ provocation that it’s hard not to see the entire film as an extension of that philosophy. Whatever impressive stylistic coups Emilia Perez does pull off, it ultimately just comes across as a two-and-a-half hour version of one of those insufferable newspaper political cartoons that, for no discernible reason, fancies singing you a song every 10 minutes.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 