EMILIA PÉREZ: 3 ½ STARS. “unlike any other film that will be released this year.”
SYNOPSIS: “Emilia Pérez,” a new Spanish-language musical crime drama starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and now playing in theatres, is a subversive story about the search for happiness and affirmation of identity. Zoe Saldaña plays a burned-out Mexico City lawyer tired of defending drug related clients. When she is offered the biggest fee of her life by a fearsome cartel leader, who hires her to facilitate his “retirement” (i.e.: disappearance) and transition into an authentic self, she can’t say no. “What do I risk?” she asks. “Becoming rich, “replies the cartel leader.
CAST: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, and Édgar Ramírez. Written and directed by Jacques Audiard.
REVIEW: “Emilia Pérez” mixes-and-matches Broadway style production numbers with telenovela melodrama and pulpy crime drama to create a genre-bending, emotionally authentic story about the possibility of erasing the past to create a new future.
A full-blown musical, with three lead performances—Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón—characters who burst into song and inventive and enthusiastic choreography, the story may seem overstuffed, but director Jacques Audiard’s pedal-the-the-metal staging ensures the various story threads weave together.
Gascón (the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival when she shared the Best Actress Award with her “Emilia Pérez” co-stars) provides the film’s heart. As Emilia, she is as benevolent as she was vicious when she was a cartel boss. On her path she not only learns to love herself, but also the people around her, and in return, be worthy of love. The scenes with her kids—particularly a song in which her young son, who thinks his dad is dead, remembers his father—are tender and coloured with a bittersweet quality.
If all the action revolves around the title character, it is Saldaña, in a career best performance, who takes command. She has sung and danced on screen before—in “Vivo” and “Center Stage”—but never with this kind of passion, ferocity and fearlessness. Her character Rita is the audience surrogate, a guide through the increasing labyrinthine story.
She is aided by composers Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais whose score and show tunes provide the emotional underpinnings of scene after scene, but also forward the story with songs that jump styles as often as the movie cycles through genre.
Gomez is given less to do but delivers the film’s strongest vocals and hands in a fine dramatic performance.
Ultimately, Emilia’s journey to happiness begs the question, Can the sins of the past be remedied by the actions of the present? Audiard, who also wrote the script, clearly has ideas on the subject, but no spoilers here. Suffice to say, the film’s dramatic final third keeps with Audiard’s penchant for envelope pushing.
“Emilia Pérez” is quite simply, unlike any other film that will be released this year. Is it a musical, a cartel story, a musical soap opera or a eulogy to those lost to cartel violence? The truth is it is all those things, banged together in a form that feels fresh and exciting.
