“Emilia Pérez” is a curious musical about a trans drug lord

The artificiality of the musical and the exaggeration of the melodrama have their meaning not as an escape from reality, but as an illumination of it. The two genres collide in a startling way in “Emilia Pérez,” a Mexican-set extravaganza from veteran French director Jacques Audiard, about the dealings of a lawyer with a drug cartel boss. The film is rich in dramatic twists and lively song and dance numbers, but they serve more for show than to express any underlying substance. Rather than suggesting the depths of thought and feeling that lie beneath the surface of a busy life, the film’s exaggerations and devices merely serve Audiard’s energetic but narrowly deterministic approach to the story.

The lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is brilliant and frustrated. As an employee of a prominent criminal defense attorney (Eduardo Aladro), she must write court speeches that he simply memorizes and handle cases that contradict her sense of justice. Early on, she helps exonerate a man she believes is guilty of killing his wife, and her frustration erupts in a musical scene on the street: she dances amidst a choreographed group of passers-by, singing about “justice for sale.” . ” and about stories of violence and love that take place “in the courtroom of your conscience.” (A little later, she vents her professional frustrations in a musical number set in the empty courthouse, supported by an all-female cleaning crew.) But then an opportunity arises that seems to offer a way out. The drug cartel boss Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) has recognized her talent and frustration and has an unusual assignment for her. He summons her with the promise of vast riches in a Swiss bank account and explains the mission: she must arrange for him to undergo gender reassignment surgery and the wholesale reorganization of his life and family that the transition will entail. Manitas’ mix of temptation and intimidation brooks no rejection: “Listening is accepting,” he tells Rita, and she does both.

At this early point, Rita is portrayed as both a subordinate who spends her time writing documents in a cramped office and a fully connected gamer who sends Manitas on worldwide missions on an “unlimited” budget. For him, she visits a clinic in Bangkok that eagerly sells what Rita calls “sex change operations,” and we’re treated to a lively musical sequence under bright operating room lights. (“Vaginoplasty!” “Yes!” “And penoplasty!” “Yes, yes!”) She also consults a doctor in Tel Aviv, who starts a quiet, catchy and completely dubious musical number with the warning that he works on bodies, but “Will never mend the soul.” He advises against the procedure – curiously, no one uses the contemporary term “reassignment” – but ultimately falls back on Manitas.

Although Rita works for a criminal and is lavishly showered with his ill-gotten gains, for once she does what she considers principled work. (The dangers and complexities of their behind-the-scenes dealings remain hidden and waved away.) But their work becomes increasingly complicated and risky when Manitas reemerges after the operation with a new identity: the Emilia Pérez of the title (Always still played). , now without masculine drag, by Gascón, who came out as transgender in 2018). Rita supposedly brings Manitas’ wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two young sons to Switzerland for their protection and provides them with fake names and real money. To explain Manitas’ disappearance, his death is staged and Emilia begins a new life. She clearly has no plan other than to live off funds effectively laundered by Manitas’ apparent death.

Four years later, Emilia (whose life remains unexplored in the meantime) calls Rita again for help with a new ruse. She misses her children and has a daring plan to bring her and Jessi into their Mexico City household (despite the conflicts in the relationship that manifest themselves in Jessi’s writhing, thrashing, angry songs and dances on a bed and in of a fantasy disco). Emilia remains faithful to her former life, even as the power of wealth and the threat of violence grow ever closer. Nevertheless, out of remorse for her reckless behavior as Manitas, she founded an organization, La Lucecita (“the little light”), to search for victims of cartel-related violence. She bravely makes her public appearance while trusting Rita with the practicalities.

The many levels of deception and the multiple dimensions of romantic complications on which Emilia builds her new life create an exuberant operatic drama. The great leaps in time, the great changes that take place in their gaps, the large-scale social actions that appear as if at the snap of a finger, offer the songs and dances the opportunity to convey the subjective power and emotional energy of all that is left implicit. But the musical numbers, which range from lurid to jazzy, sentimental to angry, lack the revelatory power of the arias of a good opera or the songs of a good musical. The dances just keep things moving at a level of exciting distraction more befitting television commercials. Even a passionate number in which Rita reveals the sordid backgrounds of La Lucecita’s rich and powerful patrons is an inconsequential and impersonal flash.

Furthermore, the characterizations of Emilia and Rita reveal not only Audiard’s confidence in his ability to keep the audience on the edge of their seats and cursing the details, but more importantly his fundamental curiosity about them and the implications of the lives they lead. The complexity and peculiarities of Rita’s collaboration, first with Manitas and then with Emilia, are presented and taken up again in short lines of dialogue. As for Emilia, the film transforms a kind of tragic heroine into a protagonist with no inner life, a chess piece to be moved on a board with labeled identities and delicate concerns. Audiard essentializes Emilia’s gender transition as a transformation into a world mother figure. This is trivializing and derogatory, not because such a transformation is unlikely, but because the director doesn’t make it plausible – giving Emilia no ideas, memories, point of view, voice.

Even the well-crafted tension remains empty; The film offers not even a hint of interest in what Emilia hopes or fears as she boldly presents herself as a suddenly prominent public figure. This is all the more depressing because the story is rich in piquant practicalities and symbolic associations – opportunities to give great power to small gestures, to magnify the moral challenges and emotional conflicts of everyday life, and to express philosophical thought in simple and populist terms. In rare moments, “Emilia Pérez” offers tantalizing hints of the movie that could have been (as in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it knife-and-gun scene or another in which Emilia interrogates Jessi heart-to-heart). It also provides a spectacular springboard for its cast. Gascón, who shared the best actress award at Cannes this year with three of her co-stars, embodies Emilia with calm command and wry majesty, with a wit that borders on authority and vulnerability; Saldaña conveys thought into action, passionate energy that suggests untapped strength and determination.

But on the whole, it seems like Audiard couldn’t be bothered. His embrace of genres and storylines for their own sake, without regard to their meaning, is more or less the foundation of his career. (I’ve written about this cavalier approach to his subjects in reviews of his 2009 crime drama “A Prophet” and his 2021 romance “Paris, 13th Ward.”) His work represents an inversion of the relationship between subject and narrative Instead of relying on the formal devices of storytelling to explain the stories’ characters and milieus, he squeezes the life out of the characters and themes to fit the Procrustean limits of an efficient story. “Emilia Pérez” presents twists that exhaust themselves in an effort to stir up tension; The film is a wild ride to nowhere. ♦