It’s hard to go into movies these days as a blank slate. Long before they hit the screen, films like Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez build a tidal wave of award season buzz, audience hype, and the deadly audience counter-hype. So here’s my challenge to you: know as little as possible about the hype cycle before watching Emilia Pérez and let all of it – the good and the bad – wash over you. This is the year of Megalopolis and we’re all about the madcap visions of septuagenarians.
Lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is desperate for a change. Despite her talent at getting into the minds of a jury, she is forced to sit in the shadows in court, mouthing along to the closing remarks she wrote as her boss preens before the judges. Castro is also fed up with her clientele; the more politicians and celebrities she helps escape justice, the more she feels she has sold an important part of herself for pennies on the dollar.
So if she’s going to sell out, she’s going to sell out for the highest possible price. That’s what leads her to the van of Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón), a local cartel boss who has handpicked her for a dangerous assignment. Manitas desperately wants to complete gender-affirming care, and Castro is the only person discreet enough to help Manitas become Emilia Pérez. But as both women soon find out, the past has a way of coming back to you when you least expect it, and soon Castro and Pérez are working to atone for a lifetime of sins.
While Emilia Pérez has been billed as a musical, it might help to get a bit more pedantic with that definition. Audiard’s film would be more accurately described as an operetta – a mixture of speak-singing and vocal numbers that favor short concepts over conventional melodies. From the film’s dazzling opening number – a night market where Saldaña’s attorney composes the closing remarks amidst a crowd of strangers – the film bursts into percussive numbers at odd intervals, often between performers of vastly different vocal abilities. On the spectrum of Hollywood musicals, Emilia Pérez sits a lot closer to Repo! the Genetic Opera than West Side Story.
And if you treat Emilia Pérez the way audiences would traditionally view operettas – as the sillier and less complex sibling to operas – you might have a better lens through which to view the film. There’s no denying that the movie tackles some complex issues with something less than grace; some audience members may never accept that Pérez deserves redemption from her past sins as an architect of mass death. But there is also real pathos to scenes where Gascón captures a woman torn between two lives – one of which she voluntarily abandoned. Like every good musical, Emilia Pérez is a movie with big feelings, even if the feelings sometimes (often) outpace the logic.
There are also well-deserved flowers to be had for both Saldaña and Gascón. Saldaña has spent the last decade of her career bouncing between big-budget productions – Marvel movies, Avatar, and the occasional Star Trek feature – and it is good to see her cutting loose in something more ambitious in form. Meanwhile, Gascón gives a powerful dual performance as the title character both pre- and post-transition. Her earnestness in the role is what makes it easy (or easier) to forget the atrocities Del Monte committed in search of peace.
It’s hard to know where all of the big ideas onscreen – such as advocacy for missing persons or the depiction of the transgender experience – fall on a spectrum between exploitation and earnestness. Navel-gazing numbers about loneliness might be a staple of musicals, but they risk being tone deaf in a story grounded in such real-world pain. I guess that means Emilia Pérez is the ultimate intersectional exercise in supporting women’s wrongs – and whether you hate it or admire it boils down to how much you weigh its penchant for musical realism.
This article appears in November 1 • 2024.