Noise Aside…
If you haven’t already illegally torrented awards season’s biggest mess it does have its big screen moments.
Emilia Pérez
Director: Jacques Audiard • Writers: Jacques Audiard based on his libretto, and Boris Razon, based on his novel
Starring: Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez
France • 2hrs 12mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 27 • IIB
Grade: B-
There’s an old saying out there in “the biz” about there being no such thing as bad publicity. That bonkers credo has never been more precise than when applied to the Oscar-nominated, award-winning (BAFTA, Golden Globe), Palme d’Or contender Emilia Pérez, the sudden lightning rod that Netflix paid US$10 million-ish to put on its platform. If you’ve been under a rock, the film was met with a flurry of praise at Cannes, then fawning, and then backlash, much of it from Mexican (where the story is set) and trans (the main character is a trans woman) people. Then came the receipts for star Karla Sofía Gascón’s past Tweets about the scourge of Muslims and immigrants in Spain and how George Floyd – murdered by cops – was a lazy thug and the shit really hit the fan. It could make Emilia Pérez this year’s Crash or Green Book at the Oscars (super long shot now), but who cares? Gascón is attending and that’s going to be worth watching for the cringe of it all. All that, of course, overshadows the film itself as a piece of art. The biggest question is: Is Emilia Pérez any good?
Short answer: It’s okay. It’s not quite the masterpiece early word would suggest (frequently the case with Cannes), and it certainly isn’t up to standards director Jacques Audiard set for himself by his prison drama A Prophet, the challenging immigration saga Dheepan and the unconventional western The Sisters Brothers. Is it clumsy about its Mexican drug cartel milieu? Sure. Is Emilia Pérez the most rounded trans character of the year? No, but in a perfect world she could be more fun. Is the Gascón clusterfuck distracting? If you want it to be, sure, but we should ask ourselves: Did the transphobic clusterfuck Dave Chappelle stepped into distract from his comedy specials – which Netflix defended BTW?
Pointing at her headache
Emilia Pérez is often unwieldy in its execution thanks to its aggressive blend of romance, musical, telenovela melodrama, and crime thriller, most vividly recalling Leos Carax’s more successful music mash-up Annette. Very briefly: Ahead of finally diving into gender-affirming surgery, drug cartel boss Juan “Manitas” Del Monte prepares for a new life as Emilia Pérez (Gascón) by hiring a lawyer, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña in a luminous performance that’s been lost in all this muck) to help with the plan. Rita is ambitious and smart, but she’s struggling with her moral compass after successfully defending a big media type in a case involving his wife’s death. She argues it was suicide and it works. Shortly after her courtroom victory she gets a call from the cartel and is hired by Manitas. It’s down to her to find the doctors for the surgery and Swiss real estate for Manitas’s American wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their kids to live in after his fake death. This death will allow Emilia to live, free from the shackles of the drug trade. All goes to plan, and four years later Rita is a hotshot legal mind in London, where she crosses paths with Emilia – who wants her children back and to reunite with Jessi on some level. That’s not so easy, as Jessi doesn’t want to go back to Mexico, and only does so that she can see her boyfriend, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez). The family’s repatriation goes about as well as Gomez’s Spanish, so we’re told, and really? We’re going to jump down her throat for having a funny accent when Gerard Butler’s Greco-Caledonian monstrosity made him a star in 300, don’t even start me on Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange, and the whining has already started for Brady Corbet using AI to correct “bad” Hungarian?
Point is, there’s plenty about Emilia Pérez that’s messy: it’s goes for retrograde in how Emilia, when angered, drops her voice a few octaves to a heteronormative, threatening masculine level, and the story relies on the idea that Emilia won’t be a “real woman” until after surgery, reinforcing the notion that gender and transness are in the genitals. Adriana Paz as Emilia’s lover Epifanía is hilariously the only Mexican actor in a film about Mexico City – shot on a Paris soundstage. Are the cartel dynamics presented on the reductive side? Considering the film’s been dubbed a “narcomusical”, probably. Much of that could have been avoided by leaning into the fantastical, telenovela instincts more, because in not doing so the result is tonal inconsistency; it’s unable to decide on whether it wants to be a ridiculous soap opera or a drama.
But there is good stuff in here, and it’s difficult not to appreciate the fact the film, as it is, even got made when major studios and producers have no time for creativity and originality. Score and songwriters Clément Ducol and Camille turn in some diverse and energetic work, the highlight being Saldaña’s “El Mal” – think of the fundraiser scene in The Square – and yeah. Gascón is strong in the title role in what is ultimately a redemption story (dear god, the irony) about two women trying to make things in their lives right; Emilia atoning for the wreckage wrought by her old life, and Rita for manipulating the law she so respects to insulate and benefit only the 1%. Emilia Pérez is a fantastical, melodic romp and if you choose to separate the art from one of its artists it plays that way just fine. Were Gascón’s comments gross? Hell yes, and her increasingly frantic apology tour was even grosser (her career is over) but Netflix’s sudden, bullshit indignantion is equally gross and if we can separate those dickbags from their product, surely we can do the same for this film – even if the result is a shrug of indifference.