“Emilia Pérez” is a unicorn of a film. It’s a Spanish-language piece written and directed by a French artist, Jacques Audiard. It stars some of Hollywood’s biggest names like Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and rising star, Karla Sofía Gascón. The actresses shared the Best Actress Award at Cannes, and the film will be distributed by the streaming giant Netflix today. Oh, and it’s a musical melodrama about a cartel boss whose gender transition leads them to become the titular character.
The film shouldn’t work, but that is part of its intrigue. In a risk-averse media landscape, Audiard’s will is laudable but proves to be a bit too ambitious, as the film sinks under the weight of a lackluster story and unmemorable songs. His choices may be daring, but many are also unnecessary.
If the recent “Joker: Folie à Deux” is any indication, music does not always improve a film. In the opening number, “El Alegato,” an exhausted lawyer, Rita (Saldaña), dances through a crowded street and a courtroom, bemoaning the oppression of corruption and sexism in Mexico. But to what end? In “Emilia Pérez,” song is a place of refuge in the film where time seemingly stops for characters, allowing them to air out their personal grievances. However, time does not stop for the audience as their words ultimately ring hollow. Strong performances — and a hefty lighting budget — cannot dress up the fact that Audiard doesn’t have a substantive critique of corruption.
Audiard also doesn’t have anything to say about transgender identity, other than perhaps that it is tragic. In “El Encuentro,” Rita travels on behalf of Emilia to find the best gender-affirming doctor in a musical number that straddles the line between camp and outright offensiveness, as doctors wheel around severely bandaged patients on stretchers and chant about their genitals. More earnest moments, like pre-transition Emilia musing, “I want to have the life nature won’t let me,” are tinged with an off-putting bio-essentialism. Audiard seems to work from the underlying assumption that to be trans is to be in a tragic battle against nature, in a manner less nuanced than it is blunt, especially coming from a cisgender male writer.
Relying on another trope, Emilia is also deceptive — after she transitions in secret, she reunites with her wife Jessi (Gomez) and two children but withholds her true identity. At this point, the distance between past and present proves to be too great, losing the emotional throughline. Emilia — who before her transition was a cartel boss — dedicates her new life to finding the victims of cartel violence and consoling their bereaved families. While this is supposed to stem from a place of guilt, she has changed so much that it’s hard to believe that Emilia was ever a cartel boss. When Emilia’s violent side resurfaces toward the end of the film, it’s not believable. The film’s conclusion is abrupt and out of place as it doesn’t have a solid enough emotional foundation to justify the extreme actions characters take, leading everything to feel like a case of meaningless sequencing. At least Emilia is never outed in the film, as Audiard narrowly avoids another trans narrative trope.
At times, there is something playful in the film’s illogic and excess. “Emilia Pérez” clearly draws from the melodrama of the telenovela. Its star, Gascón, is experienced in the genre. There is beauty in someone making outlandish choices just because they can. On paper, the film’s antics sound fun. Every plot point doesn’t have to conform to narrative logic, but the film is missing an emotional core that would allow audiences to enjoy its colorful staging and performances. Hopefully, “Emilia Pérez” makes space for other risk-taking projects in the future, but the film itself misses the mark.
Contact Sawyer Gouw Ranzetta at [email protected].