Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon
“EMILIA PEREZ” My rating: B (Netflix)
132 minutes | MPAA rating: R
By all rights “Emilia Perez” should collapse under the weight of its borderline crazy ambitions.
That it doesn’t, that in fact it keeps us from sneering despite a staggering level of telenovela-level melodrama, is one of those weird wonders that makes watching movies so much fun.
This Spanish-language effort from French director Jacques Audiard (he shares screenplay credit with Thomas Bidegain and Lea Mysius) is many things all at once.
Gangster picture. Social commentary. A tale of personal (and sexual) liberation.
Oh…and did I mention it’s a musical?
The yarn starts out with Mexico City criminal lawyer Rita Castro (a makeup-free Zoe Saldana) hitting a personal and professional dead end. She hates her job getting bad people off the hook, venting her frustrations in an opening musical number.
(Throughout the film Camille Clement Ducal’s songs are employed to reveal the psychology of the various characters. There’s very little in a traditional musical comedy sense; the emphasis is less on melody than on percussive delivery and a kind of repetitive chanting. In many instances backup singers deliver what can only be described as choral raps. Visually the restless approach to these numbers reminds of Baz Luhrman’s work on “Moulin Rouge.”)
Looking for something new, Rita agrees to meet with a shadowy new client, and finds herself grabbed and blindfolded. When the hood comes off she’s sitting opposite one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords, Manitas Del Monte, a bearded, tattooed terror with a long history of murders.
Manitas has a very special job for Rita. He has for years desired a sex change operation, and wants his new attorney to search the world for medical clinics where he can undergo the transition in ultimate privacy. This is all top secret…not even his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two young children know of Daddy’s double life. And all the while his freedom and very existence are threatened by the authorities and rival gangs.
The upshot is that Manitas fakes his own death, goes to Israel for months of surgery and therapy, and emerges as Emilia Perez.
Here’s what’s mind boggling…both the scarily masculine Manitas and the very feminine Emilia are portrayed by Karla Sofia Gascon, a Spanish actress who made the transition from man to woman several years ago. She is utterly convincing with either persona.
Manitas/Emilia returns to Mexico and with Rita’s help tries to atone for her sins by creating a non-profit that works to determine the fates of thousands of citizens who have vanished in Mexico’s never-ending drug wars. Manitas was responsible for not a few of those deaths. There’s a documentary-style montage in which imprisoned sicarios testify to the atrocities in which they have participated.
Selena Gomez
On a personal note, Emilia finds love with the grieving mother (Adriana Paz) of a missing teenage boy.
And, posing as Manitas’ cousin, she invites Jessi and the kids to live with her. This way Emilia can be close to the children she was forced to abandon, and she can keep tabs on how Jessi is handling the considerable fortune her “dead” husband left behind.
Yeah, that’s a lot. And there’s more, but this isn’t the place for a litany of plot points. Let’s just say that “Emilia Perez” had me glued to the screen even when my b.s. meter was sending up red flares.
But the acting…Holy Cow!! No wonder Saldana, Gomez (doing a 180 from her buttoned-up character in “Only Murders…”), Paz and especially Gascon were jointly named best actress at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where “Emilia…” also won the jury prize as best film.
Different segments of the film feel like reflections of other movies (trans drama, gangster epic, family trauma, Almodovar’s “The Skin I Live In”), yet the way these familiar elements have been combined feels surprisingly original. And here’s where the musical elements play a big role — by having the characters periodically break into song writer/director Audiard signals early on that we’re dealing with a heightened realism, that while the film may appear to be rooted in the real world, it’s operating on an entirely different emotional and intellectual plain.
I can honestly say I’ve seen nothing quite like it.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 