You have to describe the thing you’re marketing somehow, but when your product is something really original, it can be hard to find the words.
Press releases describe Emilia Pérez, written and directed by the French director Jacques Audiard and starring Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz, as a “musical crime comedy film.” This rather desperate word-pile makes it sound like more like a Bugs Bunny than what it is – an astounding, modern, Spanish-language opera.
The most problematic of those terms is “comedy,” which is likely to mislead prospective viewers. Despite many funny moments and an unquenchable lightness of heart, Emilia Pérez has more in common with a narcocorrido or John Woo’s Face/Off than with Young Frankenstein. Extreme violence is a fact of the movie’s world – which is not to say that’s all there is to it.
Our story begins as we meet a smart Mexico City lawyer, Rita Moro (Saldana), who, because of her gender and color, is stuck doing the scut work for a light-skinned male dolt whose specialty is getting wife-killers acquitted. She describes the job as helping “the rich get richer and the bad get worse.”
We’ve got her and her life after the two opening songs: the film’s catchy, organic-feeling numbers are fully functional, advancing the plot and our grasp of character without the “let’s stop here and sing for a while” awkwardness of most musicals. It helps that everyday speech slides much more easily into poetry in a Romance language than in English.
After a particularly galling trial, Moro is contacted by a mystery client, who turns out to be a fearsome cartel chieftan, Manitas del Monte, played in heavy prosthetics and low light by Spanish-born trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón. Out in the desert night, surrounded by giant pickups and metal-toothed thugs, Manitas is roughly the last person you’d suspect of gender dysphoria, but so it is, and he offers to pay Moro millions to manage the logistics of realizing his desire to become a woman. (“My real self is like a beast that has followed me like a shadow.”)
Moro swallows her terror and says yes, flying off armed with a “VISA Infinite” card to find him a surgeon, fake his death, and move his clueless young wife (Selena Gomez) and two kids to safety. After an agonizing round of surgery, Manitas, renamed Emilia Pérez and played by a now-revealed Gascón, emerges transformed, happy, and safe. But she misses her children, so she enlists Moro to arrange her return to Mexico and reunite her with them and their baffled mother, while Emilia pretends to be a rich distant cousin.
Then she and Moro begin trying to right some of the wrongs of her former life – of their suffering country – by spearheading a movement to find and identify the bodies of Mexico’s tens of thousands of disappeared. Their success in this endeavor actually makes sense from a character point of view: Emilia knows the people who know where the bodies are buried. And whatever you want to say about big-time crimelords, they have drive and organizational ability.
In the course of her crusade, Emilia even acquires a lovely girlfriend (Adriana Paz). Manitas’ young “widow,” angry about how she’s been jerked around, is the only cloud on Emilia’s post-transition horizon.
Is any of this credible? No. Is that a problem? Absolutely not.
The poet W.H. Auden, a great opera fan, once said that “no good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
“I am what I feel,” Emilia sings at one point. The film feels a bit like a particularly hectic and tender Almodovar movie, but enlivened with song and a bit of dance. The soundtrack music seems to coalesce from the roiling soundscape of the streets – from, for example, the haunting “fierro viejo” chant of the Mexico City scrap haulers that plays over the opening and closing titles – and it pours unselfconsciously from the full hearts of shoppers, gangsters, doctors, and cleaning ladies – and from a sleepy child lying in the arms of an “aunt” who smells comfortingly like his beloved, missing papa.
We know early on that Emila’s tale must end in tears, if not blood – in her former incarnation she committed crimes that no good deed can wipe away. But it also ends, corrido-like, in apotheosis. That Emilia realizes her true self – becoming not just a woman, but a sort of saint – reflects a clear-eyed, forgiving humanism that lifts the film like a vast balloon.
Emilia Pérez was awarded the Jury Prize at Cannes, and the Best Actress award went to the movie’s four leads as a group. It’s the French entry for this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar. I haven’t seen any of the other contenders. But I’m rooting for this madly entertaining, of-the-moment musical to take it home.
