In a plot with a lot, Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is a talented lawyer in Mexico City whose good work goes unnoticed, so she thinks, until she gets a message to meet a stranger at a news stand. Nearing 40 and jaded with her circumstances, she goes, and is then whisked off to meet the head of one of Mexico’s cartels whose name is feared on the streets. He has a proposal, but to hear it is to accept.
This explosion of a film has Mexico at its heart and the format embraces Mexican soap opera culture, although what follows is much more. The cartel kingpin Rita meets is Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascón), already two years into a sex change and in need of her help to manage the final transition.
Rita’s well-paid assignment will be to find a good clinic, get him there, manage his financial affairs, and care for his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two little boys after he has gone. Manitas must die in order to be reborn the woman he always felt himself to be.
From a gruesome bout of head-to-toe surgery emerges the splendid Emilia Pérez, who went to Tel Aviv a man and came back new. Four years later, she tracks down Rita at dinner in London and asks her to come to Mexico.
None of this is ordinary. Writer and director Jacques Audiard, 72, has some exciting and unconventional films behind him, including the tough redemption story Rust and Bone, starring Marion Cotillard as a woman in a wheelchair, and the devilish gold-panning western The Sisters Brothers (2018), based on a novel by Patrick deWitt. Nothing pointed to a late-career transgender musical that includes an exceptionally whacky sequence with Rita shopping medical procedures while a Mexican Greek chorus runs through what’s on offer.
This is not a musical where people break into reflective song. The singing is more of an overflow of ebullience from a storyline one medium cannot contain. The music rises out of the film’s structure like a percussive understory that ascends into a chant or a fully-fledged dance. The songs often contain a moral thread and are at their most accusatory when Rita, dressed in red velvet, names the corruption in the room at a swanky fundraising event.
Audiard’s films are always strongly cast but the women in this are exceptional. Gascón is well-known in Mexican soaps and a transwoman with a wife and daughter, so it was a dream role for her. Saldaña is a big star in the Marvel and sci-fi universe, and always hoped something bold and Spanish-speaking would come her way.
Gomez is a dream as Jessi, the widowed mother who is sent off to a villa in Switzerland, ostensibly for her own safety. There she learns her husband has been killed, identified by his DNA. She comes into her own when Emilia, posing as the children’s aunt, brings them back to Mexico City to live under one roof.
Audiard based the film on a character in a novel and always saw it as a story told with music. His original plan for an opera libretto proved too contained and he landed on the format of an exuberant telenovela, the Mexican version of a limited series.
The strength of the ensemble and the thrill of the beats make this more of an event than a film; it is best seen on the big screen although it will come to Netflix. Like all soap operas, there is not much coherent character development or motivation, and even Rita, driven by social injustice and presumably riches, finds little to enjoy.
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Pérez seems to discover through womanhood how appalling she was as a murderous, drug-dealing cartel boss, which raises more questions than it answers. Gascón’s warm and impressive performance aside, it is hard to grasp what is being said about transgenderism and sexual reassignment.
Despite the awards, Audiard may struggle to find a Netflix audience for a queer musical spliced with Mexican political commentary that mixes themes of the repatriation of the bodies of the disappeared with cartel mayhem, told in Spanish with subtitles. It may, in the end, not say much about any of these things but it is extravagantly entertaining.
Emilia Pérez is screening again on November 2 at Palace Nova Eastend as part of the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival.
Read more Film Festival reviews and stories here.
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