Selena Gomez appears in a scene from Emilia Pérez.Shanna Besson/The Associated Press
Emilia Pérez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Written by Jacques Audiard
Starring Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz
Classification R; 132 minutes
Premiering earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, French director Jacques Audiard’s newest film, the musical crime thriller Emilia Pérez is said to have received a standing ovation of up to 11 minutes. Having now watched Audiard’s movie, this offers further evidence that a robust ovation at Cannes is perhaps more indicative of the length of time that French audiences are willing to stand in order to praise celebrity than anything of particular substance.
Notably Audiard’s first film as sole screenwriter, Emilia Pérez follows the gender transition of its titular character, a vicious and feared Mexican cartel leader known to her peers as Manitas Del Monte. Wishing to finally live in the feminine body and gendered experience she has long dreamed of, Emilia (portrayed by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists – cartel-style – the help of an overworked and underappreciated working class lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldana) to help Emilia disappear and begin her new life, leaving behind her two young children and wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez).
Originally intended to be an opera libretto in four acts, Audiard’s screenplay takes the inspiration for its main character from French author Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute. In terms of the character we see in Emilia Pérez, Audiard’s vision is undoubtedly a step backward for the representation of trans women in cinema, which historically has already been, in a word, abysmal.
After her gender transition, Emilia now lives luxuriously abroad in London and having faked the death of her former self in Mexico, is haunted by her past as a cartel boss. Reunited by chance with a now successful and more worldly Rita, the duo work together to find an NGO (of which Emilia is the public face) that hopes to bring closure to communities and families who have lost loved ones owing to cartel violence.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a story about the ghosts of one’s past if Emilia’s own history didn’t make unwelcome reappearances. After reuniting with Jessi and her children under the guise of being a distant cousin of Manitas’s (yes, a la Chris Columbus’s 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire), Emilia struggles with reconciling her and Jessi’s past relationship with their irrevocably changed present context, “reverting” to violence and manipulative shows of power when faced with the mounting pressures of her current reality.
This would be alright if these kinds of harms weren’t deeply coded as a “regression” on Emilia’s part to her previous “male” self; notably, actress Gascón lowers her voice several registers in such scenes and, later on in the film, has her perfectly manicured fingers – previously a crucial component of her character’s feminine visual syntax, alongside sleekly elegant costuming undertaken by Anthony Vaccarello of Yves Saint Laurent – cut off by kidnappers.
It’s a whirlwind of a plot that is reminiscent of the most ordinary of telenovelas – if those telenovelas had been completely stripped of their cultural specificity and instead authored by an all-too-eager French voyeur. Despite its insistence on the collective impact of some of Mexico’s most structurally marginalized communities, Emilia Pérez was, notably, filmed at a studio near Paris, choosing instead to reconstruct its imagery and backdrop from a Frenchman’s reductive imaginings of Mexico.
Emilia Perez is also responsible for some of the worst songs that audiences have seen from an onscreen musical in at least a decade (the witless and cringe-inducingly literal sing-songy lyrics performed as Emilia prepares for gender-affirming surgery are particularly ghastly), relying on repetitive stream of consciousness lyrics rather than actually using the capacity of the medium to a more transformative potential.
The film doesn’t try to approach the heights (if not, salvation) of camp (think queer Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar) but rather settles in a particularly ignorant space of using its subject matter and characters as pure fodder for Audiard’s unethical approach to building out – much like the majority of his filmography (see 2015′s Dheepan or 2010′s A Prophet, amongst others) – yet another story world that he has no sustained relation to, no lived experience of, and, clearly, no sense of care for its actual realities.
It’s a film that refuses to commit to the basic demands of a musical and, worse than that, doesn’t seem to care about the basic complexities of its own characters, including the communities most affected by the cartel violence it all-too-easily hangs its narrative hat upon. It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense. Which is all to say: it will probably win an Oscar.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)