Starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramírez
Director: Jacques Audiard
Country: Mexico / France
UK Distributor: Netflix
Back in May, Emilia Pérez arrived at the Cannes Film Festival to much acclaim, where it picked up the Jury Prize and Best Actress for Karla Sofia Gascón, marking the first time a trans actor has won a major acting prize. Set in Mexico and performed in Spanish, this is actually a French film, made by renowned auteur Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust And Bone, The Beat That My Heart Skipped), based on his own opera libretto, which is loosely adapted from the Boris Razon’s 2018 novel ‘Écoute’.
Rita (Saldaña – Avatar, Avengers) is a budding criminal defence lawyer who is scouted out by a notorious gangster, Manitas (Gasćon – El Señor de los Cielos). Unexpectedly, she is tasked with sourcing the best possible surgeons to perform gender-affirming surgery to allow the gangster to begin a new life as a woman – known as Emilia Pérez – but entirely in secret. With the rest of the world believing the gangster is dead, Rita is also given the task of re-housing Emilia’s wife (Gomez – Only Murders In The Building) and children far away from the criminal underworld they are all escaping from.
What follows is an Almódovar-esque drama about hidden identity, especially as Manitas wants to be reunited with her children, even if her wife has begun a relationship with another man (Ramírez – Zero Dark Thirty, The Assassination Of Gianni Versace). But despite its high-stakes setting of the Mexican drug cartels, it descends into little more than a soap opera, as a fragmented family tries to find a new normal for themselves in the wake of Emilia’s transition. The overlooming threat of organised crime had a lot of dramatic potential, but this goes mostly unexplored in the final act of the film. In reality, the final hour could really have been set anywhere, forgetting as it does the high stakes of its opening.
The film is also a musical, which is an… intriguing choice. Most of the songs are speak-sung, meaning that the vocal range of its performers is rarely explored and, despite containing an actual popstar in Selena Gomez, lacks any songs that make a real impact. The performance style is fractured and stylised, which does feel unique and fresh, but when the songs themselves are non-descript, it all falls rather flat. And with a run-time of two and a quarter hours, it’s frustrating that its musical numbers serve only as character reflections instead of furthering the story at any point. Subsequently, as musicals go, this is drawn-out, plodding and forgettable.
This is one of those films that I would absolutely have loved to love, but is instead a prime case of style over substance, where a genuinely interesting idea has been overshadowed by the window-dressing of a director who wants every single bell and whistle and wants them in abundance. And while a character redemption sits at its heart, there is a perplexing absence of any tangible exploration of the criminal underworld. This might be an innovative film in its execution, but in substance it feels like a story that lost its way.
UK Release: Out now to stream on Netflix, released by Pathé
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