After Rita (Zoe Saldana) gets her client off on crimes he is clearly guilty of, she receives a mysterious phone call prompting her to meet a powerful cartel leader, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón).  Looking to retire, the career criminal charges Rita with finding a surgeon who will perform a sex change operation so that he can live as the woman he has always dreamed of being.  Beyond that, Rita also needs to move his wife, Jessica (Selena Gomez), and their two children to a safe house in Switzerland.  Years later, in London, when Rita meets a woman, Emilia Pérez, she finds herself ensnared back in Manitas’ criminal web. 

Jacques Audiard directs Emilia Pérez, his adaptation of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute.  Audiard opted to mount the adaptation as a musical with original songs from Camille and scored by Clément Ducol.  Damien Jalet provides the choreography, embracing all the freedoms provided by the imagination of the stage as well as the mobility of the camera, operated here by Paul Guilhaume.  The 132-minute film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival where it was acquired for theatrical distribution by Pathé but will ultimately be seen by its widest audience courtesy of Netflix.  In a beguiling and convoluted twist, France submitted the film for consideration at the 97th Academy Awards despite the majority of the spoken – and sung – word being in Spanish. 

Across the narrative span that Audiard sets off upon, Saldana is tasked with keeping everything on course.  It is a strong performance which threads the needle of the narrative, but can easily be overlooked given that she is playing the straight man in an otherwise wild world, especially once Emilia enters the scene.  In that way, hers is a thankless role, but it is written with all the gravitas of a leading performance even if she does not always get to have as much fun as the other characters, especially in the middle act.  Rita is the undeniable captain of the ship for the first act as she finds a surgeon for Manitas’ transition and also navigates moving the family to Switzerland; a process which will give her some of the more pomp and lively song and dance numbers allowing Saldana to show off her cross discipline.  The pacing is incredibly snappy – something that will remain consistent across the narrative as it spins off into its various storylines and comes crashing back together – so that we do not even realize just how much is going on and how little of a handle we have on what we are seeing. While Rita takes a bit of a backseat allowing Emilia to guide the story to its no-holds-barred conclusion, Rita’s role in the finale is impressive and Saldana shines as she emerges from this narrative stronger than ever, successful in the trials which Audiard has laid out for her.

Before all of that, however, the first act of the film finds us struggling to get our footing in the narrative. Rita is unhappy in her work and confused at why Manitas enlists her help. It is all very detailed and rich, we are engaged and never bored, but we do not quite know what sort of shape this narrative will take. The film really picks up at the arrival of the title character, Emilia, at about the one hour mark, and it is like a lightbulb clicking on as we realize up until now we had not yet met the titular Emilia so of course the preceding action was mired in hazy confusion.  Gascón already had the stand out song of the first act – “Deseo” – where she explains the gender dysphoria she has felt in life ever since she was a child, and it is the song that not only endears us to her pain, but also proves to Rita that this surgery is not just a ploy to escape being found.  It is a much slower song than anything Rita had been involved with, but Gascón imbues the lyrics with such yearning which revels a deeply emotional core at the center of this otherwise riotous story. 

While the color palate of the film ultimately betrays the comparison to the work of Pedro Almodóvar, the themes are very much in conversation with the Spanish master with Audiard examining multiple aspects of identity.  Gender identity is the prominent one here with Rita’s opening number lamenting that her race and gender has placed her at a disadvantage in her field in addition to Manitas’ transition to Emilia, but after the four year time jump that finds Rita and Emilia reunited, the two embark on a mission to recover and reunite families torn apart by gang violence.  All the while, themes of motherhood simmer underneath as Emilia is reunited with Jessi and their kids under the guise of being a distant relative of Manitas.  This last point leads to another emotionally stunning song from one of her young sons (performed by Juan Pablo Monterrubio) who is remarking how similar Emilia smells like his father, and how he misses him.  It is a beautiful song and Gascón delivers one of the highpoints of their performance, impressively while being the more passive character in the scene, as she reconciles with being unable to comfort her son as she so desperately wants to.

Audiard reaches a little too far in his exploration of these themes and the various layers of metaphor which he applies to the narrative.  They are all quite present and recognizable, but they do not really seem to form a deeper thesis as one would expect given the richness of the colors and characters that we see on screen.  There is something ponderous about Emilia, in her new body, devoting her time to recovering the lost bodies of those killed in gang violence, and while it can be praised that the script does not overwork this motif, its seems more like a curious biproduct with how little Audiard engages with it.  Even to show more of Emilia’s change of heart as she reckons with her own criminal past and is now working to heal the community she had a hand in tearing apart would have offered something more to work with here, but the script never digs much beyond the surface level.

Some of this may be a dark side to what makes the wild swings of the narrative work so well; the music.  Emilia Pérez is dripping with enough salacious plot to fill a telenovela, and some of those bolder choices as well as the condensed timeline are allowed to pass by a normally more scrutinous audience because of the flow of the songs and the theatricality of it all.  Much of the music adopts a speak/sing timbre so there are not many showstopping numbers or opportunities for the cast to belt out a few notes, but it is enough that it allows for less introspection than we typically would want in our stories, especially given characters and dynamics as intricate and lurid as these three are.  Emilia occupies enough of the plot that we do not feel terribly slighted, but Rita and Jessi really suffer; Jessi, almost doubly, as again, the style of music does not really allow Gomez to flex her pop star sensibilities safe for a single number towards the end of the second act.  Importantly, the songs do not break the flow of the story and they adopt a style of singing that works best in musicals for film as there are no cheap seats to reach. It can also offer less confident performers some relief, but here the proven cast does feel like they are being held back.

Emilia Pérez is a film that will play best on the big screen but has been regulated to the small screen and to suffer the fate of the second screen.  Its headfirst dive into this brazenly unique world can be off-putting simply because there is so much happening.  For audiences who are not immediately hooked it will be a difficult endeavor as the seams that seem just part of the world could be seen as massive rifts for the ungenerous viewer.  Those who give Audiard and his ensemble a chance will be treated to a popping extravaganza that could have – and by many accounts, should have – still easily packed in another 20 minutes to dig deeper into these themes and these characters.  Some of the choices which were made in the script – that this is a trans story, that this story is based in Mexico – do not always feel as significant as they should as the story progresses, but bolstered by a truly incredible leading performance from Gascón, Emilia Pérez is a tragedy and a triumph of which we cannot look away from.