Emilia Pérez (2024)
A sexual transformation throws a Mexican drug lord's life into free fall
Gascón at the movie’s moral vortex: Emilia is troubled, wrong and right all at once
Emilia Pérez (2024)
Streaming on Netflix
This movie sets a staggering array of subjects spinning. Sexual identity, female empowerment and blood-soaked criminal violence swirl in a thick, potent brew. I swallowed it the only way French director Jacques Audiard’s breakneck pace allows, in gulps, transfixed.
If its sinuous plot weren’t confounding enough, it’s also a musical. But its spectacular scenes aren’t punctuated by classic movie musical “big numbers”.
Set mostly in modern Mexico, a country still plagued by murderous drug cartels (its newly elected president has just declared yet another war on them), it’s a romance/revenge cautionary tale, with music and dance stirred in like cayenne pepper.
Across 2 hours and 12 minutes we cling tightly to three women on the verge:
Emilia Pérez (the transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón). At the opening she’s a man, Manitas Del Monte, a drug lord with a wife and two sons, who yearns to be a woman. The sex change operation he seeks will satisfy a desire he’s nurtured since childhood, to become what he quietly, plaintively calls Her. Massive drug profiteering has made him wealthy enough to finally realize his dream.
Rita Moro Castro (Zoë Saldaña). She’s a talented young lawyer longing to be rid of the onerous legal research she conducts to make her less competent, better paid superiors look good in court; Manitas hires her to travel to Bangkok (to book an appointment at a renowned sex surgery clinic) and to Tel Aviv (to recruit a gifted surgeon to perform the procedure).
Jessica (Jessi) Del Monte (Selena Gomez). She’s Manitas’ wife and the mother of his children. She’s devoted to Manitas but still feels he’s a man of mystery; it’s Jessi Rita will convince Manitas has actually died once he fakes his death and transforms into Emilia Pérez.
All three women itch with frustrated cravings. Audiard, with his fellow screenwriters, puts them under duress to see where each comes down, how they jolt, trigger and inspire one another.
Emilia, Jessi and Rita clash with and care for one another, at a galvanizing clip
When Manitas kidnaps Rita and offers to make her rich if she’ll help him to change sex and fabricate his death, she unwittingly starts to become a smooth operator, not simply a lawyer for hire.
As she travels in search of a clinic for the operation and to hire a physician who specializes in gender-reassignment surgery, a newfound power glints in her eyes.
A cold calculus, gleaned from Emilia, creeps into Rita’s personality, letting her easily, cunningly lie to Jessi about Manitas’ “death”.
Four years later Rita’s prowess in masterminding gets a more daunting challenge. We meet the “new” Rita in London. A handsomely paid corporate attorney, she cuts a glamorous figure in a flowing hairstyle and fashionable evening wear at an upscale bar/restaurant.
Who should sit next to her but Emilia, also chicly turned out, offering Rita a proposal?
Revealing that she is indeed the very Manitas whose female identity Rita helped bring about, she asks the high-flying attorney to return with her to Mexico. She needs a shrewd lawyer’s help funding an NGO to give aid and comfort to families of “the disappeared”, the murdered victims of the drug cartels’ cycles of horrific violence.
Rita agrees. What’s most important to grasp is that Audiard and his writers let these two women slowly bond and take courage from one another. They believe male prerogatives no longer control them.
But the stubborn fact remains that Emilia was once Manitas, that is, precisely one of the rapacious men who’ve befouled Mexico with rampant violence and drug-dealing.
Yet Emilia is feeling strangely omnipotent, all but untouchable. The “widow” Jessi has moved to Switzerland with her – their – children. Emilia brashly talks Jessi into bringing the youngsters back to Mexico City.
Emilia, the script puckishly suggests, has transformed into what’s merely commonplace: a modern woman who wants it all.
She bogusly claims she’s a distant cousin of Manitas, who once asked her, she lies, to see about his children if he died. Rita arranges the return, and the children are urged to fondly address their “deceased” father’s cousin Emilia as tia, aunt.
Audiard’s darting cuts (the editing is by Juliette Welfling) and hallucinogenic cinematography (by Paul Guilhaume) make for a glowing, propulsive watch.
The mystery about glimmering, perhaps not so invincible, possibly fluid sexual identity is Audiard’s overarching subject. It suggests the call to arms he’s issuing, the questions he wants opened up, the conversations he wants to spark.
He also throws down his ace. He tosses in completely unexpected music and dance numbers. They’re not conventional, balletic song and dance moments meant to lift us out of our seats.
Quite the opposite. They don’t idealize the action, they’re plopped in the middle of it, snarling and sarcastic, to rub our noses in reality.
Which is exactly why they stun. Dazzle and morbidity mix and mingle. In the opening scenes as Rita laments her fate as a law firm drudge, she’s joined on the streets in song and dance by rows of Mexico City’s bewildered citizens.
Her plaintive singing isn’t just about herself. It’s wailed and shouted by the masses bemoaning what’s gone disastrously wrong in Mexico’s civic life.
At the sex surgery clinic, the grinning medical staff who show Rita the sex change options on offer for Manitas sing and dance giddily. Surgical transplants and the re-purposing of sex organs are presented as breezily as Tupperware. Male to female or the reverse, they warble, it’s entirely up to you.
In the most powerful number, “El Mal”, at a posh fundraiser Emilia holds in support of her NGO to help families who’ve lost relatives to drug violence, Rita mocks the well-heeled benefactors for their shallow do-goodism.
Whirling in a blood-red pants suit, she circles among the guests, leaping on tables, taunting their wealth and privilege in a society where corrupt public officials do nothing for the disadvantaged, especially “the disappeared”.
Shifting to cool stylized lighting, Audiard dims the chandeliers and spotlights the black-tie guests, who, in a kind of unacknowledged admission of their guilt, thump the tables, stamp their feet and sway to Rita’s taunts.
In Audiard’s passionate, old-fashioned rabble rousing, hypocrisy can’t remain hidden forever. Music and dance in this director’s vision always signal a warning or an excoriation. They’re never truly exhilarating.
Power duo: Emilia and Rita standing up for victims of brutal cartel violence
That raw, straight-from-the-gut pleading also underlies the performances. Audiard trusts his actors to go overboard in their earnestness. As matters come to a head, all the major characters have to summon do-or-die strength as their illusions crumble.
Which makes for thrilling portrayals. Sometimes the actors seem to break the fourth wall, which Audiard clearly relishes. Aching vulnerability – that look we all recognize on the faces of panicking double dealers – is precisely what Audiard gets the camera to nail.
Most unnerving is Gascón’s shape-shifting Emilia. The transitioned woman fools nearly everyone, while we in the audience feel the tension of keeping her transformed sexuality secret.
The trick in Gascón’s performance is to get us to believe that Emilia would like to come clean, to see her entire self, reoriented from male to female, accepted by the world.
Since we know that’s an ongoing struggle for many in our own societies, we become complicit in Emilia’s “duplicity”. Who in the audience, this fiery actress gets us asking, hasn’t felt they have more than one person inside them struggling to step into the light?
Equally heretical is Saldaña’s Rita. The crafty lawyer is always devising ways and means for others to slip out of trouble. Is she as two-faced as Emilia? To her own astonishment, her devotion to truth, societal and personal, is what ultimately guides her.
She’s an instance of the consummate fixer who herself needs fixing, a durable dramatic trope. But Saldaña enacts it with an elegance and an earnestness that finally bestow on Rita a touch of redemption.
Gomez as Jessi has a daunting task, to convince us that this mother of two can’t quite recognize the father of her children in the eyes of her late husband’s supposed “cousin”, the scheming female Emilia.
Gomez makes Jessi’s thrashing about poignant. A good mother, Jessi the “widow” can no longer sidestep the truth that’s now right before her eyes. How did this onetime wife fail to see her husband’s ambivalence?
Glimmering, perhaps not so invincible, possibly fluid sexual identity is Audiard’s overarching subject. It suggests the call to arms he’s issuing, the questions he wants opened up, the conversations he wants to spark.
In its swirling visuals and loopy musical experimentation, the movie at moments can feel like a romp.
But it’s a powerful, disturbing sex tragedy, by no means a screwball comedy.
It tremblingly invites a viewer to inquire about that ambiguous stranger on the street as well as the person next to you in bed: Who is this person I think I see?