Writer and Director: Jacques Audiard
Perhaps making the biggest buzz at this year’s BFI London Film Festival is Emilia Pérez, a Mexican musical starring Selena Gomez. Already considered an Oscar shoo-in, Jacques Audiard’s epic is certainly unique, but its many plotlines struggle for dominance, resulting in a film without a clear theme.
Rita (an impressive Zoe Saldaña) is a lawyer working in a firm that appears to specialise in defending wife-killers with the women’s deaths ultimately being declared suicides. When her team wins, it feels like losing; “like I ate shit”, she tells her friend on a phone after another murderer is released.
She has morals, but she also needs money. This is made further apparent when she agrees to help a cartel boss in exchange for cash. She doesn’t know yet what her role is in the deal, but the zeros on the payment figure persuade her. She is surprised to learn that her job isn’t to be illegal at all. Instead, she must find a surgeon to discreetly perform a gender reassignment operation on the drug baron. No one else should know.
After this bombshell, the musical turns breezy with a happy song about vaginoplasty as Rita travels the world looking for a diplomatic surgeon. She finds one in Tel Aviv. But after the arrangement is made, Rita’s purpose in the film alters. No longer is she the main driver of the narrative; she now takes a position like Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, watching events unfold rather than directing them.
The film then turns its attention to Emilia, the cartel boss’s new identity. She finds that, as a woman, she doesn’t always need to act tough and can live her life authentically. She now wants to help people, not order their executions. But the trouble starts when she invites her children and ex-wife to live with her in a luxurious house with a retinue of maids in Mexico.
In scenes right out of Mrs Doubtfire, Emilia pretends that she is the cartel boss’s cousin. No one suspects (why would they? It’s the last thing they would have expected from such a warlord), although one of the sons, in a sweet song, wonders why his aunt’s hands smell just like his father’s. Their new lives run smoothly until, just like Mrs Doubtfire, jealousy threatens to rupture the household.
Selena Gomez gives Emilia’s wife Jessi such a brattish demeanour that it’s hard to feel sorry for her, even though she’s being lied to. All our empathy resides with Emilia (a tremendous performance by Karla Sofía Gascón, winning Best Actress at Cannes along with Gomez, Saldaña and Adriana Paz), especially when she sets up an NGO to return the corpses of Mexico’s many Disappeared to their families, another strand that peters out, unfortunately. Emilia is elegant but dangerous: a ruthless queen.
The narrative doesn’t require song and dance, but their addition definitely makes for an interesting approach. Apart from Gomez and Saldaña, none of the cast is a particularly good singer, perhaps an attempt to inject some realism into a story that becomes so fantastically epic. And all the songs, apart from the brilliantly electric first one set in a Mexican market with some neat choreography, are frustratingly short. But, thankfully, there are no big musical theatre numbers pushing the film into a sentimental mess.
Emilia Pérez’s strangeness will, no doubt, see it amongst the Oscar nominations, and it’s heartening to see a trans actor in a starring role. However, this strangeness also works against it, and the ending seems like a cop-out.
Emilia Pérez is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
