Kimber Myers
A musical thriller about a trans woman who escapes a life as a male drug lord in Mexico City should be something. The bold concept alone feels invigorating, with musical elements making it further stand out from the standard fare we’re often served. Yet outside of a few wild scenes, a quartet of electric performances, and a song that finds multiple rhymes for “vaginoplasty,” Emilia Pérez is surprisingly tame. In the hands of a filmmaker like Pedro Almodovar, this could’ve been full of campy thrills, but what we see from Jacques Audiard is less striking in its execution, despite the French writer-director’s attempts at a daring vision.
Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldana) receives a mysterious call that offers her wealth beyond what she will ever make as an overworked and overlooked lawyer in a male-dominated firm. Despite the risks, she accepts and begins working for a notorious cartel kingpin (Karla Sofía Gascón). The request Rita receives is unusual: the drug lord wants Rita’s help to achieve a lifelong goal of transitioning to a woman. Emilia Pérez (also played by Gascón) emerges, leaving behind a wife (Selena Gomez) and children who believe their husband and father died. Emilia reinvents herself as a philanthropist, but she cannot entirely leave the people she loved in her past.
Emilia Pérez opens with the stark credit “SAINT LAURENT PRODUCTIONS,” whose all-caps Helvetica Neue font may be recognizable as a part of the fashion brand led by Anthony Vacarello. Saint Laurent is the first fashion house to produce feature films, with a nascent slate that also includes works from David Cronenberg and Paolo Sorrentino. They aren’t just making movies; they’re aiding in the creation of Cinema-with-a-capital-C, whose auteurs have as identifiable a style as the designers in their field. While Emilia Pérez does have some gorgeous clothing, it isn’t a two-hour commercial for Saint Laurent or even for fashion itself. If you didn’t recognize the label, you wouldn’t suspect a luxury line was present in its creation.
So those who see Saint Laurent’s involvement shouldn’t expect the strong visual style of, say, Tom Ford’s films. It has Audiard’s trademark shaky camerawork, and there are a few scenes that are well shot, but there’s little remarkable in its visuals. Audiard plays with lighting and sound in the musical sequences, often making it appear that there’s a spotlight on the action while leaving everything else in shadow. Ambient noise fades away as the song takes center stage. It’s not particularly inventive for a movie with intentions this audacious, though some scenes work better than others with the technique.
Emilia Pérez also isn’t the type of musical where you finish watching and immediately go to Spotify to stream the soundtrack. The music itself is fine enough, but the lyrics—particularly those sung in English—are overly simplistic and repetitive in a way that feels lazy rather than catchy. The aforementioned song that rhymes “vaginoplasty” is at once too campy for this movie and not fun enough for what it’s attempting to do. None of these tunes stick in your head the way that those from the best musicals take up residence; these pass through, gone the moment the next scene begins.
That’s probably for the best, given that the songs in particular use some regressive language around the trans experience. In one song, Emilia sings that she is, “half him, half her,” and it’s hard not to cringe (and imagine the social media reaction when this movie is on Netflix). Emilia Pérez does have empathy for its heroine and admiration for her transition, so this isn’t coming from a bad place, but that doesn’t mean it’s good either. It does deserve praise for refusing to leer at Emilia and her body in ways that movies might have done in the past.
Despite some of its less-than-current ideas about gender, Emilia Pérez belongs to its female actresses. Edgar Ramírez is the only recognizable male actor in a small supporting role in the movie’s second half, but there’s little for him to do — and there’s no demonstrated need for his part to have been played by someone of his level of fame. Yet the trio of actresses at this movie’s heart — Gascón, Saldana, and Gomez — are what makes Emilia Pérez sing. Gomez offers raw pain and blistering rage as the grieving widow, while Adriana Paz gets some funny and moving moments as Emilia’s new girlfriend. Saldana is alternately cool and full of rage; she gets the most vibrant musical numbers and emotes well enough to make up for the subpar lyrics. As Emilia, Gascon is required to show the most range, and it’s an impressive performance that covers the character being underwritten.
Emilia Pérez is about redemption and love — as much as it is about anything — but it doesn’t fully execute even those typical themes, as a result of its surface-level exploration. A swing this big is full of risks, but what’s most surprising is how it fails to be interesting. Usually movies like this are at least compelling in their flaws, but Emilia Pérez is unexpectedly prosaic in what ends up on screen.
C
“Emilia Pérez” is currently in theaters. It streams on Netflix tomorrow.
