By Robert St. Martin & Valerie Milano
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/4/25 – At the Palm Springs International Film Festival one of the more divisive films from this year’s Cannes, Emilia Pérez, is a wild ride of a movie. This film plays like a traditional Mexican Narcos thriller filtered through the female-powered vision of an auteur like Pedro Almodóvar, but the characters break into song this time. It is unapologetically melodramatic and ridiculous, exaggerating characters and emotions in a manner that’s not going for realism as much as that expressive language that can only be captured at the movies. Some have thrown criticisms at the film for being shallow or silly, but others may find it wildly entertaining. It was a bold move by French director Audiard to make musical-comedy-gender-affirming-crime films in another language – and gather a trio of performances that shared Best Actress at Cannes.
Karla Sofia Gascon, the first openly trans performer to win an award at Cannes, plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, one of the most vicious drug lords in Mexico. He calls in an attorney named Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) to help when he decides to become a woman, leaving his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their kids behind for an entirely new life. When a powerful crime figure like Manitas wants to disappear, it takes some wheeling and dealing, so he needs Rita’s help. She will be the only person to know that Emilia used to be Manitas, even after she returns to Mexico to try and see her kids again and atone for past sins. This chaos unfolds with new songs by the duo Camille and Clement Ducol.
This is familiar terrain for Audiard, who isn’t so much a melodramatist as a sentimentalist. Emilia Pérez straddles multiple genres, but it’s largely a melo-noir about how Rita falls into the orbit of a powerful cartel leader, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), and agrees to help him fake his death, then medically transition and be reborn as Emilia Pérez. Rita also helps Emilia’s wife/widow, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and two sons escape Mexico to Switzerland, after which Emilia and Rita’s working relationship would appear to be over. That is, until a not-so-chance encounter in London leads Emilia to enlist Rita’s services again – this time to get Jessi and her boys to return to Mexico and live with Manitas’s cousin…Emilia Pérez.
That’s enough material for multiple seasons of your average telenovela, but there’s more. As Emilia’s life has been re-enriched by the presence of her family, she decides to dedicate her time and wealth to starting a nonprofit organization whose focus is on locating the missing victims of cartel violence. And as Emilia falls increasingly in love with one of the women, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), who comes to the foundation, seeking out information about her missing abusive boyfriend, Jessi sings about being manacled in golden handcuffs, while at the same time pining for the man, Gustavo Brun (Edgar Ramírez), with whom she cheated on Manitas.
Emilia Pérez was originally intended to be an opera, which perhaps partly explains its saccharine sentimentality, repetitive lyrics, and diverging story branches. But that doesn’t excuse its almost random, whiplash-inducing tonal pivots. The film also seldom commits to a point of view or idea, be it about systematic and gendered violence in Mexico, the struggles of being trans, the corruption of the government, or the struggles of being a woman in the nonprofit sector. Emilia Pérez tries to be a lot of things, only to end up being about very little.
The premise of “what if a drug lord came out as a transwoman?” hints at a little bit of fun, maybe even transgressiveness, but Audiard has opted for something much more serious and high-minded. Even the most bombastic moments get dragged down by a tone of teacherly condescension. The best noirs key their aesthetics to the psychosexual impulses of their characters, but just as its style is enervating, Emilia Pérez seldom rises above mundane portraiture.
Audiard understands that musicals often capture a feeling that something simply must be expressed through song that can’t be conveyed through traditional dialogue. The songs in Emilia Pérez sometimes push the plot forward in clunky ways. Still, they work best as expressions of simmering emotions, whether it’s Rita singing about the corruption she sees everywhere or Emilia finding love again. The music isn’t traditionally catchy, but it’s sufficiently entertaining, in large part because of how completely committed Gascon, Saldana, and Gomez are to their roles. Gascon is a bit flat as Manitas, but she bursts to life as Emilia, finding an undercurrent of regret that shades her character. The whole project carries a fascinating moral conundrum in that Manitas murdered hundreds as a criminal power broker – should we root for Emilia knowing what she did in a past life?
It’s a moral quandary that aligns with some of Audiard’s work in the past, as if he was drawn to ask questions in an entirely new way. So, while the film is clearly grounded by Audiard’s technical acumen, thematic concerns, and skill with performers. Gascon is the breakout, but Saldaña has never been better, using her physicality in dance numbers that make one want to watch her in nothing but musicals. Gomez does her best screen work since at least Spring Breakers, giving the film a different energy from Saldana and Gascon. It doesn’t work without each corner of this riveting triangle.
Emilia Pérez is imperfect – Rita disappears for too much of the back half, and the final scenes feel extremely rushed from conflict into violent climax – and one has to wonder how much the story echoes Mexican telenovelas and whether a French reading of Mexican culture is vaguely believable.
