Future films of any stripe will be hard-pressed to surpass the ambition and ostentation of Emilia Perez.
Just before the Hamptons International Film Festival’s early afternoon screening of Emilia Perez, Festival Artistic Director David Nugent took the stage to deliver his customary preface. An audience that otherwise would be met with words of earnest artistic contextualization was instead treated to an economy of language: “This is sure to be a film unlike anything you have ever seen.”
Simple enough, and prudent too, when casting one’s words at the feet of a cinematic canvas so staggering in scope that its mere existence on paper beggars belief. Or to put it more directly, how does one begin to address an operatic, bi-lingual narco-crime musical that features a transgender cartel boss as both its narrative and conceptual driving force? It’s a remarkable departure from the genre for Jacques Audiard, whose recent dramas (The Sisters Brothers, Dheepan, A Prophet) opted for stark, unyielding grit over any approximation of melody. But melody, and melodrama, are in no short supply in a film that mines Mexico for all its romantic, baroque charisma.
Zoe Saldana (in a welcome departure from the green screen) plays Rita Mora, an underpaid and overqualified Mexican defense attorney wrestling with the trade-off she’s resigned to between financial stability and a guilty conscience: the men she successfully defends are often contributing to the country’s epidemic of femicide.
Her unfortunate professional competence and its attendant inner turmoil are an occasion (or two) for song and dance, here assimilating Mexico’s populist pinks and teals in a spirited opening act. A highly publicized victory in court draws the attention of a hoarse anonymous caller, dangling riches beyond compare in exchange for an undeclared suite of services rendered – a menacing offer that gains greater urgency when she’s whisked away via crisp snatch and grab. The car’s booming narcocorridos signal to a bound and hooded Rita what she probably already knows – this is surely cartel business.
Once face to tattooed face with the agent of her capture, the audience is introduced to an archetype so paradoxically postmodern that one wonders how it didn’t arrive on the big screen any sooner: the cartel boss Manitas, an arch cartel gangster who seeks discrete and expeditious aid in his transition to womanhood. Rita is tasked with arranging the entire affair, which includes the faking of Manitas’ death and the sequestering of his wife Jessica (Selena Gomez) and two children to the snow-blank slate of Switzerland.
Trans actress Karla Sofia Gascon deftly makes the switch from flinty cartel boss to Emilia Perez, trading masculine imposition for the iridescence of her newfound femininity. While there’s much to sing about in the transition’s initial phase, the film careens towards an inevitable confrontation between Emilia’s past life and the one she’s now inhabited, a conceptual showdown emblematic of our pomo era.
Audiard’s most interesting ideas are, for better or worse, enmeshed in what will prove to be the film’s most sensitive and prominent element come its Netflix debut – a trans woman taking center stage in an inventive examination of the very act of transition itself. This is grist for the culture war mill, pure red meat for the news cycle and its cast of opportunistic grifters.
But viewers willing to wade through and beyond these toxic waters will be unsurprised to find nuance and complexity – there’s nothing to be won here save for those who can tolerate the ambiguity of honest art. It’s an off-the-wall experiment, and Audiard has found a resplendent muse in Mexico’s vital physicality – the telenovela’s form seems likely to have been an aspirational guide for the libretto that predated the script. It’s a testament to the French director’s virtuosity that Emilia Perez works on any level at all, let alone a number of them.
The problem though, with its distinctively unhinged brand of maximalist demonstration, is that it often reduces the film to an exercise in feats of technical extravagance, dragging us towards and away from the edge of implausibility with such ferocity as to induce whiplash of the senses. Regardless, it’s a worthwhile watch for those willing to submit to its gaudy, pageant-rich novelty.
