Well this is unexpected. Veteran French director Jacques Audiard takes arguably the biggest gamble of his career with the eccentric, genre-bending, Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez. Set in Mexico, it deals with female empowerment, cartel violence and the epidemic levels of disappearances in the country, as well as gender reassignment surgery and transitioning – all explored with endearingly shoddy song and dance numbers. It’s a startling departure for Audiard, but in some ways it’s also a consolidation of themes of reinvention that he has been exploring on and off throughout his career.
His 1996 breakthrough picture, A Self-Made Hero, followed an impostor protagonist who fraudulently claimed to have been a hero of the French resistance. A Prophet (2009) starred Tahar Rahim, who begins the film as a friendless teenage delinquent out of his depth in an adult prison and ends it as a kingpin in organised crime. More recently there was Dheepan (2015), the story of a former Tamil Tiger who adopts a new persona as a family man claiming asylum in France.
Alongside notions of a new identity in Audiard’s work there’s frequently a sense that some stain of the old one lingers, like blood splatters on a wall that show through a fresh layer of paint. Dheepan, for example, finds himself drawing on the violence of his old life in order to defend his new one. These themes, spiced up and at times somewhat overcooked, are central to the director’s latest film, which is loosely inspired by a throwaway story strand in the 2018 novel Écoute by Boris Razon.
When we first meet Emilia (the magnetic Karla Sofía Gascón), she’s a man. And not just any man: Manitas Del Monte is a notorious Mexican drug cartel boss. His is a hyper-macho world in which masculinity is measured in muscle and fear. But Manitas has realised that not only was he born into the wrong body, but also the wrong life. He decides to pursue gender-affirming surgery; as a woman he will leave behind cartel culture for ever by working to help its victims. To do all this, he employs Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a put-upon lawyer whose brilliant mind is wasted on drudge work for her male boss and scumbag clients. Rita locates a world-leading surgeon, organises the operation, engineers Manitas’s disappearance and relocates his grieving wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and two children to a place of safety. And Emilia’s isn’t the only transition. The already bonkers premise gets weirder: the film itself changes identity as the story unfolds, from a gritty crime thriller to a glitzy soap opera to an Almodóvar-esque melodrama, all tied together with song and dance interludes.
It’s this last aspect that initially feels like the biggest gamble, not least because of the variable quality of the music. There’s nothing here that’s claw-your-own-ears-off unlistenable, but neither is there much that you’ll be humming on the way home from the cinema. Yet while it initially seems bizarre that Audiard chose to tell this story as a musical, very quickly it becomes clear that a story this wildly outlandish, with this many tonal shifts, could only work as a musical. Moments such as Rita walking out of a court of law to be greeted by the synchronised mop-wielding of a chorus of singing cleaning ladies acts as a crucial shortcut to the suspension of disbelief required elsewhere in the film.
I’m conflicted over Emilia Pérez. On the one hand it’s a gloriously trashy and flamboyant potboiler. The performances are great fun: Saldaña’s musical numbers crackle with energy and anger; trans actor Gascón stalks through the picture like an immaculately manicured lioness. And Gomez is just phenomenal as the bratty trophy wife who gets a taste of fulfilment and will burn the world down for more of it. It’s a riotously entertaining one-off. On the other hand is the question of whether the earnest but somewhat pulpy handling of cartel violence trivialises the matter.
The scale of abductions and disappearances in Mexico is a national tragedy that many of the country’s film-makers have addressed, in dramas such as Fernanda Valadez’s Identifying Features and Amat Escalante’s Lost in the Night, and Tatiana Huezo’s documentary Tempestad. Emilia Pérez, though, is somewhat removed from the realities of cartel activities in Mexico, not only through the use of fantasy elements and musical devices, but because it was shot on a sound stage in France, with no Mexican actors in the central roles, by a director who doesn’t speak Spanish. This would undermine the film’s authenticity but for the fact that authenticity was never going to be the main priority of a movie that contains a boisterous musical number about vaginoplasty. And perhaps that’s enough. Emilia Pérez might not have anything new to say about the more than 100,000 people who have disappeared in Mexico since records began in the 1960s. The film’s messaging on female empowerment and living authentically might border on the trite. The means of delivering that message, however, does at least feel genuinely fresh and new.
In select UK and Irish cinemas/on Netflix from 13 November
