Selena Gomez’s Netflix film is a musical about a trans drug lord. It… tears?

From the first pictures of Emilia PerezAuthor and director Jacques Audiard (Dheepan, Rust and bones, The sisters brothers) makes it clear that it is a musical. This is neither a backstage musical, where the numbers take place in a performance context, nor a classic Broadway Hollywood musical, where the characters only burst into song in moments of heightened emotion. Here, the songs seem to arise from the landscape that surrounds the characters even before we meet them: a long aerial shot of Mexico City at night echoes with an eerie polyphonic song. It turns out that these are the combined voices of the city’s scrap metal sellers, patrolling the streets with sound trucks asking for used equipment. Later, the repetitive hum of tires on a highway morphs into a character’s staccato pleas for recognition and self-change—what in a more conventional musical one would call their “I do” song.

Audiard originally imagined it Emilia Perezbased on a chapter of the 2018 novel Ecoute by French author Boris Razon as an opera, and the extravagant theatricality of the resulting film is a testament to these origins. Emilia Perez There are not one, but three divas, each of whom gets more than one extended aria in which to express their outsized emotions: anger, longing, fulfillment, frustration, desire. In just over two hours, this film covers a series of events that take place on several continents over a period of approximately five years. The story, part crime caper, part domestic melodrama, part meditation on the mystery of self, involves suspense, disguised identity, the search for redemption, tragic hubris – a complete collection of themes from genres as diverse as film noir and the like -Howlers that were once known as “chick flicks.”

Although Emilia Perez is not a film intended only for a female audience, but a film that reflects deeply on the embodied experience of being a woman, a condition that some characters endure as a form of imprisonment – an unhappy woman sings about her life in the proverbial ” golden cage”. “- while others see femininity as a potential site for personal and social reinvention. As the transgender heroine (or is she an anti-hero?) of the title, Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón (a trans performer who first rose to fame in her home country before transitioning) delivers one of the most transformative and moving performances of the year, creating one Figure so extensive and full of contradictions that one can find it both admirable and irredeemable. Gascón’s powerful central presence illuminates rather than overshadows some of Zoe Saldaña’s outstanding supporting works, revealing whole new sides of herself as a singer and dancer, and of Selena Gomez, who invests her melancholic gangster wife with touches of harsh humor and a self-sabotage approach of cruelty.

The entire first act of Emilia Perez The focus is not on the title character, but on Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a criminal lawyer at a renowned law firm in Mexico City. When her sexist boss, who relies heavily on her preparation to win his cases, manages to keep a wealthy woman murderer out of prison, Rita sings her anger at working for the bad guys in a wild dissident song over a chorus of cleaning women Expression . But someone even worse is about to call her with a proposal. The notorious cartel leader Manitas Del Monte (Gascón) wants to hire someone In exchange for Rita’s help in carrying out a top-secret plan, she offers her more money than she ever dared to earn: Manitas wants to fake her own death and undergo extensive gender-affirming surgery so that she can live as the woman who she has always felt herself to be.

The implementation of Manitas’ plan will leave Rita with the miserable task of pretending to the drug lord’s wife Jessi (Gomez) and their two young children that her beloved spouse and parent is dead and that she needs to go to a safe house in New York City for her own protection Switzerland would have to move. Rita also travels to Bangkok and Tel Aviv to consult with the world’s top gender transition experts – the occasion for a stormy musical montage set to a song with the unforgettable title “La Vaginoplastia.”

The first act ends with Manitas’ transition and the appearance of Emilia, whose self-naming we witness as she prepares to leave her hospital room and re-enter the world. I won’t reveal much about the plot after this point, because one of this film’s greatest strengths is its crazy confidence in its own unpredictable development. Let’s leave it at this: Emilia, whose elegant high-femme self-portrayal truly makes her unrecognizable as the macho gangster she once seemed to be, insinuates herself back into the lives of her wife and children and claims to be Manitas’ wealthy to be cousin. Rita also finds herself drawn into the family’s life as Emilia’s partner in a new venture, a charity that seeks to undo some of the damage Emilia has caused in her secret criminal past. Along the way, Emilia meets and falls in love with the abused widow Epifanía (Adriana Paz), while Jessi meets an old flame (Édgar Ramírez) again, whose appearance takes the story south of the border, the noir territory it has been circling all along.

The songs by French composer team Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais aren’t exactly the kind that make you immediately tap your toes – they’re discursive and very plot-specific, not unlike the use of music in Leos Carax’s memorably bizarre work Annette a few years ago. But in their performance context – which can range from huge choreographed crowd scenes to an intimate duet as Emilia and her young son wish each other goodnight before bed – the songs make perfect dramatic sense and offer opportunities for an uncompromising performance by a Killer Ensemble.

In a spectacular piece performed at a lavish charity event in Mexico City, Saldaña dances on tabletops in a red velvet suit while delivering a scathing (but sexy!) critique of the country’s corrupt ruling class. Selena Gomez only gets one major solo song (plus a few duets and an end credits song), but the script gives her plenty of opportunities to turn what could have been a stereotypical gangster novel into something far trickier and more complex. Still, it’s Gascón whose boundless charisma carries the film, even through some of its rockier tonal transitions. This is a performance that will be talked about at the Best Actress awards – she’s already considered the Oscar favorite, just behind Anorais Mikey Madison – and it should be. Gascón manages to create two completely different personalities with their own singing voices for her pre- and post-transition selves. With her voice and her face alone, she shows us how alienated the Manitas we meet for the first time feels in and from her body.

Emilia Perez The film received a mixed response when it debuted at Cannes earlier this year. Some critics raved, while others pointed out that the film’s wild mix of styles and moods never quite adds up to a coherent character portrait. In the end, what are we to make of the morally conflicted, occasionally self-centered, always unpredictable but generous Emilia? While I found the film absolutely gripping, I can admit that Audiard’s treatment of the character (a cisgender man) may be somewhat reminiscent of the well-known archetype of the tragic trans woman from Jared Leto’s Rayon The Dallas Buyers Club to Eddie Redmayne’s Lili Elbe in The Danish girl. But Gascón’s generosity and skill as a performer allow her to push such boundaries, scene after scene. Right up until the end – which left me covering my mouth in horror and then bursting into tears – she continues to find new and deeper ways to be Emilia Pérez, a character (and a film) about the never-ending Project is about learning to become himself.