Emilia Pérez: The Best-Ever Musical Thriller About a Transgender Cartel Boss and the Sisterhood of Crime
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by Zoë Saldaña, to help her undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in a quest for redemption.
This is the 10th feature from the 72-year-old Jacques Audiard, a perennial Cannes favourite known for such gritty dramas about men and violence as A Prophet, Rust and Bone, Dheephan and the English-language western, The Sisters Brothers.
With Emilia Pérez, he throws everything at the wall — telenovela melodrama, crime thriller, Pedro Almodóvar-style camp noir and pop opera — and all of it sticks surprisingly well. A favourite at Cannes and the recent Toronto International Film Festival, the film heads to Netflix on November 13 after a brief Oscar-qualifying theatrical run.
Loosely adapted from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute, this femme-centric drama revolves around the desires and ambitions of a trio of hardcore señoras for transition and redemption, set against a world of corruption and violence.
Saldaña leads the standout cast as Rita, a junior defence lawyer in Mexico City, who is frustrated by a boss who takes credit for her hard work, which amounts to helping criminals and wife abusers avoid jail time. But someone has been quietly monitoring Rita’s skills and tact.
Responding to a telephone request for a secret night meeting, she finds herself snatched, hooded, and taken in a van to a rendezvous with notorious cartel leader, Juan “Manitas” de Monte (Spanish transgender actor Karla Sofia Gascón).
The bearded stranger with a gravelly voice and a metal-capped teeth warns her that, if she agrees to hear a proposal there is no backing out. But if she agrees, she will be independently wealthy. Nervously, she agrees to the terms.
Manitas wants to exit the drug dealing game by faking death. After two years of taking hormones, she wants to fulfil a dream for gender-affirming surgery and start a new life. Rita’s assignment is to travel around the world to find a leading surgeon willing to do the job with discretion.
Not even the cartel boss’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) is to know the truth. The second part of her assignment is to escort Jessi and their two young sons to Switzerland to set up new lives safe from Manitas’ vengeful underworld rivals.
The theme of inner and outer identities is revealed by the musical style, often private soliloquies where the characters reveal their feelings in tunes written by singer-songwriter Camille Damaris, combined with composer Clement Ducol’s score.
Belgian choreographer Damien Janet hands the solo to group performances in a range of contemporary styles. Business deals and courtroom addresses turn into rap, and in a scene in a Thai clinic, medical team spins gurneys and IV tubes while singing about vaginoplasty and other medical procedures.
From there, the narrative takes a series of twists, exploring the themes of transformation and penance. Four years later, Rita, has moved to London with her new wealth. One evening she attends a dinner party. It takes a while before she realizes the elegant Spanish-speaking woman sitting next to her is her old client, now the titular Emilia Pérez.
The meeting is not by chance. Emilia misses her two young sons and wants Rita to escort Jessi and the children back to Mexico City to live in a luxurious compound. Emilia plans to watch over her children, posing as Manitas’ distant benevolent cousin. Though Emilia is a more open, vulnerable and refined person than the pre-op hoodlum she once was, she is still a boss, determined to control others, including her family.
In Mexico, evidence of Emilia’s brutal past life catches up with her when she meets a grieving mother seeking to find her missing son, one of the many desparecidos, the disappeared victim of the drug wars. Emilia enlists Rita and finds herself entangled in Emily’s new philanthropic charity, a partner in crime and now a sister in kindness, exhuming the bodies of those murdered on behalf of their grieving families.
As Emilia awakens to her new life, she falls into a gentle love affair with a woman, Epifania (Adriana Paz) who she meets through her foundation. Lasting peace proves elusive though. Emilia becomes increasingly distressed that her wife Jessi has fallen in for a dubious character, Gustavo (Édgar Ramirez), leading to the complications of the film’s dark third act
Emilia Pérez has the quality of elevated pulp fiction, a chain of improbable and sensational events, serving as a moral allegory about violence and the hope of second chances. The elevation comes from Audiard’s confidently fluid direction and the assertive performance of its cast. In May, the Cannes jury led by its president, Barbie director Greta Gerwig, gave an ensemble acting award to the women in the film.
Saldaña, already established as the reigning queen of franchise movies (Avatar, Star Trek, The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy) is a revelation as a compelling dramatic actress, as well as a singer and dancer (her first career).
The breakout star here is the Madrid-based transgender actor Gascon, whose previous work has been mostly in Spanish soaps. She plays both the sinister Manitas and the maternal Emilia, finding a through-line of gritty determination in both versions of herself. A strong third cast member is pop singer and actress Gomez (Only Murders in the Building), showing off unexpected acting chops as Manitas’ pampered but tough wife and mother of his children.
Some viewers may resist this mashup of fanciful set pieces with gun fights, shallow graves and white-knuckle car chases, but there’s art and method to the Audiard’s mayhem, in a film that, like Emilia, defies easy categorization and embraces the range of contradictory emotions of which people and movies are capable.
Emilia Pérez. Directed and written by Jacques Audiard, adapted from the novel Écoute by Boris Ramon. Starring Zoë Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Édgar Ramirez. In select theatres including TIFF Lightbox November 1 and on Netflix November 13.