EMILIA PÉREZ (France | 2024 | 132m | Jacques Audiard)
To its enormous credit and occasional detriment, Jacques Audiard’s improbable musical is as mercurial as its title drug kingpin-to-society queen would-be heroine. With something new every few minutes the boldly ambitious film succeeds in never being boring while it has an enormous amount to say (sing).
Karla Sofía Gascón gives a groundbreaking turn in the title role, Selena Gomez acquits herself well as a horny widow, and Adriana Paz makes a powerful impression with limited screen time. The movie’s all over the place, but it is at its best when Zoe Saldaña — as a lawyer (Rita) tired of doing all of the work with none of the reward — and her ferocious intelligence is onscreen. As the story opens, she’s practicing law in Mexico City, singing through her conflicted feelings while spending her evening writing up a closing argument for her boss to get a rich bastard client off the hook for murder. It’s a great speech and it works, even when he stumbles through it.
Her work on the case catches the attention of a rich, powerful, violent cartel leader (Gascón) who wants to make a huge life change. Kidnapped and brought against her will into the remote desert of a menacing drug lord convention — all swirling dust, piercing headlights, and parties — she’s invited to take on a new career challenge. If she’s willing to take some dirty money to get the work done quietly, she’ll become very rich. Lots of criminals want to disappear, but this one wants to truly transition: leaving family and criminal enterprises behind to live truly as a woman. The search for the right specialist sends Saldaña’s Rita around the globe in a series of amusing and often penetrating song-and-dance numbers to find the right doctors for the job. Shots that take in international cities and make note of the luxuries of a travel card function to show Rita finally also appreciating a sense of her own worth.
When Rita’s work as a fixer is done, doctor secured through cloak-and-dagger transit, and money transferred, family (Selena Gomez and their two kids) shipped off unhappily to snowy Switzerland under false pretenses of their safety, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte’s can finally be reborn beneath bandages as Emilia Pérez. Rita never even gets to see her new face.
Of course, it will hardly be the last time their paths cross. Audiard picks up the tale years later, Emilia having achieved new echelons of power and societal approval with the vast fortunes she acquired as Juan. Their meeting is played with shock and fear as the realization of recognition sets in; over a table of socialites they feel each other’s motivations out in Spanish language and song.
Rita’s pulled back in; Emilia has a new mission: reuniting Mrs. Doubtfire style with her abandoned family. There’s comedy in the way they come back together and the degree to which the Mexican-born kids miss the snow and how Gomez’s widowed housewife misses having a man in her life. Amid the continued deception of a homelife, Pérez jarring finds a charitable cause to occupy herself. Whether this is meant to be truly making amends for a violent past or another case of a rich person seeking self-flattery and the spotlight adds a satiric wrinkle. The high profile charity work and a surprising love story are all part and parcel of Audiard’s amusingly prickly, often contradictory mess.
Adopting the tone of telenovelas and propelled by French singer Camille’s original songs and Clément Ducol’s original score, it’s an amusing melodrama that still takes identity seriously. Even as it goes delightfully off the rails, the momentum of the story and the passionate performances of the whole cast elevate into something memorable.
Original review ran when Emilia Pérez had its Canadian Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival