The peaks and valleys in Jacques Audiard’s latest film, the musical “Emilia Pérez” never come where you might expect them. A wealthy Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofia Gascón) sits across a table and asks a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help them find a way to fake their death and facilitate affirmative gender surgery into a woman. The moment is treated without distinction or wonder. Instead, like much of the film, the scene plays out with vivid earnestness as if the emotional beats of this moment are the most important thing that could happen. Scenes later when they meet again at a table, the cartel leader now transitioned and going by the name Emilia Pérez, assures the lawyer, Rita, that their “accidental” meeting does not pose a danger to her. The lights go out on screen as they begin to sing, isolating the two women as they sing together. Again, the emotional swerves come from unexpected places.
When Emilia sings of being happy and now feeling like herself, Saldaña’s face takes it in with immediate sincerity. The drama is not in the ostensible strangeness of the situation. Instead, we are meant to be struck by Rita’s face softening and taking the emotional clarity of the moment with an almost operatic level of seriousness. It’s like the emotional wallop of Marion Cotillard dancing to Katy Perry’s “Fireworks” in “Rust and Bone”. Audiard takes these emotions very seriously. That kind of emotional candour feels apt for the emotional density of the musical as a form. Characters do not so much sing distinct songs in “Emilia Pérez”, as much as we find the music pouring out of them like emotions that overflow.
The early parts of “Emilia Pérez” set up a dense plot of complications. Rita is an ambivalent lawyer who feels her brilliance is wasted defending criminals. When Manitas offers her access to endless money, her intentions are not altruistic. When the two meet five years later, Emilia insists on having Manitas’ family (his wife Jessi, and two children), who think him dead, return to Mexico after hiding in Europe for safety. Jessi (Selena Gomez) is sceptical about Emilia, who pretends to be a distant cousin of Jessi’s dead husband, but finds the time in Mexico to live the life she could not when Manitas was alive. When she resumes a fling with a former lover, Emilia finds her new life as a benefactress and activist for the poor threatened by her parental rage. This is all work that could unravel into something overwrought and absurd but when Emilia and Jessi have a late-night conversation about whether she was faithful to her husband Audiard is zeroing in on Gascón’s wistful knowingness. Jessi might not know who she is, but she knows what it is like to feel trapped in life. Later in the film, when Jessi sings of wanting to love and live her life as freely as she wants to at karaoke with her lover she could be singing for herself as much as for Emilia.
When Emilia, in an act of contrition for her criminal past, does her best to locate missing people with her wealth she falls in love with a widowed woman whose husband abused her (Adriana Paz as Epifania). As the two sing lovingly to each other, it is as if both women are being seen for the first time, by each other but by themselves. Later in the film when Epifania meets Rita, Rita is startled to know that Emilia has considered Rita as a sister. She pauses and considers this, a delicate reminder that something sincere can linger beneath. Saldaña is the most adept in the cast at conveying much emotion in silence. It sounds like a strange asset for a musical, and yet it’s the richness in carving interiority in her silences that turns Saldaña as the constant watcher in the lives of chaos around her that recontextualises so much of it emotionally.
“Emilia Pérez” often feels as if it’s bursting at the seams to be larger and more sprawling than it is. It feels brisk at its 130-minute running time and often feels like a more expansive three-hour version is trapped inside it. Things move fast in the world of the film, a contemporary Mexico where poor people form a chorus singing their ambivalence to the audience. “This is a story about violence,” Rita sings to us at the beginning. She’s writing a script for her boss to recite in court, defending a man on trial for murdering his wife. When Rita receives a call from a whispered voice promising millions for a job she finds herself hired by Manitas to help him transform to a woman. The best asset of “Emilia Pérez” is the way it plays none of this ironically, or salaciously. Absent of words, the two figures a male presenting gangster and a female presenting businesswoman sit across from each other. Who would think it was a song about a feeling of gender dysphoria and a yearning to transform oneself? Such are the aesthetic and formal jolts of “Emilia Pérez” which surprises me with how earnestly it all plays.
At its end, when it leaves the main characters for a song of earnest love to the title character “Emilia Pérez” reasserts itself as more thoughtful on the possibilities of transformation than you might expect. It wants you to look closer at how people remember us, and what kinds of legacies we leave with us. In a moment of fraught tension, when someone from her former life recognises her they sing to Emilia “Manitas”. She responds insistently, “No, it’s Emilia”. Audiard insists that the desires of these characters, to be seen and to be heard, are more consequential than the tragedy of reality around them. All we want is for someone to look closer. Beneath the ostensible. Audiard resists literalising or universalising Emilia’s story. This is not a wide look at a concept or a world but an expressionistic account of the operatic vastness of the emotions of these specific women.
“Emilia Pérez” is available to stream on Netflix
