Karla Sofia Gascón plays the role of Cartel boss Manitas who opts for gender reassignment in the musical Emilia Pérez. Photo: Supplied / Shanna Besson/Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinéma
Review - The fact that Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, winner of the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy, is a musical is pretty much hidden from prospective audiences by the movie's trailer because studios don't trust that audiences will trust musicals to entertain them.
And yet Wicked is smashing box office records around the world. Should audiences enchanted by the Broadway dazzle of that film be enticed by Emilia Pérez? Yeah, let's see about that.
Emilia Pérez is, I think, the most divisive of all the big awards contenders this year. Critics either love it or hate it - there appears to be very little middle ground. This is a good thing. Films that generate big responses usually do so because of ambition and ambition is what we like to see. And Emilia Pérez takes some very big swings.
Unappreciated Mexican lawyer Rita (played by Zoe Saldaña) feels her career is at a dead end. Then a surprise phone call introduces her to a new life - for her and the person on the other end of it.
Cartel boss "Manitas" (Karla Sofia Gascón) wants to leave the business and his old life by undergoing gender reassignment surgery and become the woman he always thought he should be. The procedure will kill two birds with one stone - by faking his own death he'll be free to enjoy his riches without attention from the law and as Emilia she will be fully living her own truth.
Too bad for his wife and kids, this has to be a top secret operation and Rita travels the world looking for the right combination of skill and discretion to get the job done.
Years later, the call of her old life becomes too much, and Emilia asks Rita to bring her former wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and the kids back to Mexico where she can pretend to be Manitas' cousin and they can all live happily ever after together. Except that things don't quite work out like that.
I really wanted to enjoy Emilia Pérez and was rooting for it for ages until, I'm sorry, it just lost me. I think it's great that we are getting stories that centre trans characters and give big opportunities for trans performers - Karla Sofia Gascón is the first trans actress to win the Best Actress award at Cannes (even though she had to share it with the rest of the female cast).
But this is a melodramatic story - Audiard originally intended it to be an opera - and its tragic arc suggests that Emilia can never fully transcend her original toxic masculinity from when she was a gang boss. Despite all her best intentions, there's no amount of redemption possible for someone who delivered so much terror and anguish.
Zoe Saldaña plays the role of Mexican lawyer Rita in the musical Emilia Pérez. Photo: Supplied / Shanna Besson/Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinéma
One definition of melodrama is "unearned emotion" and as the film went on, I found it was increasingly reaching for big moments without the character or story justification to support them.
It's also a story about Mexico told with almost zero Mexican involvement. Most of the creatives are European and Saldaña and Gomez are both American. (Saldaña spent much of her childhood in the Dominican Republic and Gomez is proudly of Mexican-American descent although neither have ever lived in Mexico.) Normally, I'm pretty relaxed about the right of artists to portray cultures and identities other than their own, art is imagination after all, but Emilia Pérez feels like tourism rather than a serious attempt to understand that world.
Emilia Pérez is fundamentally misguided, not because it is a film about a trans character, not even because of what they have chosen to do with the character - I may disagree but it's artistically forgivable.
No, it's misguided because of how they have chosen to go about it.
Gascón and Saldaña are giving everything but Gomez seems all at sea and none of them are helped by the fact that - and this is the biggest miss of all - there are no decent songs in this film. Written by Clément Ducol (who also wrote the score) and his partner, French pop artist Camille, the lyrics were imagined in French, translated to Spanish on the set and then translated back to English for the subtitles we enjoy here.
But the songs of a musical are the scaffolding - everything else is built around them. If they don't work (or are unappealing, unremarkable, or unmemorable) the prospect of entertainment seems an awfully long way away. And the musical numbers don't really add very much to our understanding of the story, except their presence provides a kind of ironic distance that protects the filmmakers from any accusations of sincerity.
Emilia Pérez is rated R13 for violence, offensive language, sexual themes and content that may disturb and is playing in select cinemas across New Zealand.
