Lose You To Love Me
My thoughts on Emilia Perez
After watching Jacques Audiard’s latest, Emilia Perez, most viewers will have thoughts racing through their minds about what they have just witnessed but I am fairly comfortable that the phrase “Eh, I’ve seen that before” will not be among them. To say that this is a film that takes a lot of big swings is an understatement and normally I live for movies that fly so completely in the face of conventionality—I am, as you may recall, one of those odd souls who raved unreservedly over Francis Coppola’s Megalopolis a couple of months ago. The trouble is that few of these swings actually wind up connecting with anything as a result, both the initial cheeky audaciousness of the entire enterprise and a number of very good performances end up getting swamped by spectacle of an ultimately empty nature.
One of the loopiest narratives in recent memory kicks off with Rita (Zoe Saldana), a Mexican attorney who has grown disenchanted with extricating her rich lowlife clients from crimes for which they are clearly guilty (while her boss gets all the credit), when she is contacted by notorious cartel leader Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon) with a proposition too rich for her to refuse. He asks her to fake his death, arrange for him to medically transition from a man into a woman and help his unknowing wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two children relocate from Mexico to Switzerland for their safety in exchange for untold riches. She manages to pull all of this off and assumes her work is done but a couple of years later, now relocated in London, she ends up crossing paths with the transitioned Manitas, now going by Emilia Perez, and her former client now has a new request—get Jessi and the kids to return to Mexico to live with her under the assumption that she is a distant cousin of Manitas.
Newly energized by the return of her family, albeit without them knowing it, and increasingly guilt-ridden over her past misdeeds, Emilia, with Rita’s help, begins a nonprofit dedicated to finding the still-missing victims of cartel-related violence and providing aid to their grieving families, a move that makes her a national heroine and leads to an unexpected romance with Epifania (Adriana Paz), whose abusive boyfriend is one of those lying in an unmarked grave somewhere. Meanwhile, Jessi finds herself pining for the former lover (Edgar Ramirez) with whom she cheated on Manitas with, even admitting the affair to Emilia. Tensions among the women involving their various secrets eventually boil over as things build to a climax so melodramatic that even the most outrageous of soap operas might reject it for being way too over-the-top. Oh yeah—I forgot to mention that in addition to everything mentioned above, Emilia Perez is also a full-blown musical in which the characters sing and dance their ways through the key events, including the scene in which Rita negotiates with a gender confirmation surgeon in the Philippines for his services.
Ever since it premiered earlier this year at Cannes, where Saldana, Sofia Gascon, Gomez and Paz shared the Best Actress award and Audiard was given the Jury Prize, the film has engendered sharply divided opinions—some have praised it to the skies for the sheer audacity of the concept and for the performances of its female leads while others have charged it with cultural appropriation (for having a Latino-dominated narrative presented by a French filmmaker), an insensitive/exploitative approach to the trans-related story elements (especially that aforementioned production number) and for just being a big mess. Regarding the specific accusations of appropriation and insensitivity, I recognize that I may not be quite the right person to offer commentary along those particular lines and would gently recommend steering you towards other critics who might offer a more nuanced perspective on those elements.
If forced to, I would point out that a number of Audiard’s past films, such as A Prophet and Dheepan, have seen him dealing with non-French characters and their specific dynamics, and so to see him doing that here, while perhaps a bigger stretch than usual, is not entirely outside the norm for him. On the other hand, I would say that his take on trans issues tends to veer between the reductive and the dated, especially in that aforementioned musical number (in which the transitioning experience is discussed, naturally, by two cis people), which feels like a deleted scene from Myra Breckinridge that has inexplicably been restaged without recognizing that things have changed in the last half-century or so.
My real problem with Emilia Perez is that while the concept and narrative conceit make it sound like a throwback to the kind of wildly transgressive works that Pedro Almodovar used make in the early part of his career, the whole thing ultimately turns out to being almost shockingly mundane when all is said and done. Although the premise all but screams campy excess, even without the addition of the musical element (which proves to be a bit of a disappointment due to the tepidness of the songs in general), Audiard has elected to give the material a more serious-minded approach and while that kind of take worked well in his unforgettable Rust and Bone (which chronicled the romance between an brutish would-be kickboxer and a killer whale trainer that turns in unexpected ways when the latter loses her legs one day in an accident at work), little of it clicks here in any significant or emotionally gripping way.
Oh sure, it raises any number of potentially provocative or interesting issues regarding gender, identity, sexuality and notions of guilt, sin and redemption but barely scratches the surface on any of them—this is the kind of film that seems to suggest that the act of transitioning alone will transform a brutish man into a gentle and empathetic woman, only to have them reverse that attitude the moment the screenplay requires them to get angry (complete with a return to their masculine voice during those moments). This is a movie that all but screams out for complexity in regards to its characters but we there is precious little of any of that on display as it hurtles towards a finale that, considering the preposterous nature of what has preceded it, is shocking only for how dully conventional it is.
And yet, as dumb as Emilia Perez gets at points (and it gets very dumb at times), it remains sort of watchable for most of its elongated running time. Some of this is no doubt the result of wanting to see just how bizarre it may get as it goes on, much of it is due to the genuinely strong performances found in the central roles. The best performance of the bunch comes from Gomez, who takes a character who is almost entirely comprised of the very cliches one might expect to find in a story involving the wife of a drug kingpin and uses her considerable star power and underrated acting chops to make it seem fresher than it really is. (Perhaps not coincidentally, she also winds up coming off best when it comes to the musical aspect.) Likewise, Sofia Gascon delivers an undeniably bold performance in the title role that ends up bringing more shading and nuance to the character and her humanity than Audiard bothered to provide and her scenes with Paz, making the most of the smallest of the key females roles, manage to be touching despite their general implausibility. Saldana doesn’t quite make the same impact as the others, mostly because she is stuck with the most conventional character to play and the one who changes the least, but she does throw herself into the musical numbers with an energy that cannot be denied.
Despite their efforts, Emilia Perez feels like a film that began with a nifty idea that never quite got developed into anything of note, becoming increasingly repetitive and forgettable as it goes on in ways that no amount of surface flash can completely disguise. That said, while it is ultimately kind of a bad film, at least it has the dignity to be the kind of oddball bad movie that only a filmmaker of Audirad’s undeniable excellence could create—a more run-of-the-mill type would never take leave of their senses long enough to pursue such a thing in the first place. As recent off-kilter musical mashups go, I certainly prefer it to the deeply tedious likes of Joker: Folie a Deux—at least it fully commits to the genre-blending bit—but in the end, it doesn’t really prove itself to be much of anything. Emilia Perez has ambition to spare and is certainly trying to be a lot of different things but is ultimately undone by its inability to commit or connect to most of them when all is said and done.