Emilia Pérez (Preview)
Reviewed by Karen Backstein

Produced by Jacques Audiard, Pascal Caucheteux, and Valérie Schermann; directed by Jacques Audiard; screenplay by Jacques Audiard based on the novel Écoute by Boris Razon; cinematography by Paul Guilhaume; edited by Juliette Welfling; production design by Emanuelle Duplay; art direction by Virginie Montel; music by Clément Ducol and Camille; starring Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Edgar Ramírez. Color, with English and Spanish dialogue with English subtitles, 132 min., 2024. A Netflix release.

Jacques Audiard has stated in numerous interviews that he “does not like musicals.” Yet now he has made one—or something close to one—in Spanish, a language he does not speak. Thanks to its unique subject matter, integration of song and dance, and Hollywood stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, Emilia Pérez has earned unprecedented “buzz.” With its overtly political agenda, elucidation of a corrupt social structure, and its use of music as message, however, the film has more in common with Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera (1928) than with Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952).

Although Audiard has referred to his cinematic influences—including Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972)—Emilia Pérez has a different emotional and cinematic tenor from those works. While it uses recitative, like Umbrellas, it does not do so consistently. Like Cabaret, it focuses on politics and society, but unlike Cabaret’s performances, which take place mostly on the Kit Kat Klub stage, Emilia Pérez’s performances take place in “real life.” And while there is a requisite Busby Berkeley moment, this film owes little to Hollywood. One influence Audiard never mentions is the Mexican cabaretera—a genre that also includes song and dance, combines music with melodrama, and focuses on women. Does Audiard know this genre? Did he have it in mind?

Audiard has likened the film’s story to an opera libretto; he even considered creating both an opera and a ballet. In IndieWire, he alluded to “an operatic way of thinking” behind the project, with music as “an instant conduit to emotion.” While “emotion” in the traditional Hollywood musical often becomes, as Richard Dyer noted (in “Entertainment and Utopia” in Only Entertainment, Routledge, 1992), utopian in feel, here it frequently serves as an outlet for basic communication, rage, or protest.

Loosely based on a fleeting moment in Boris Razon’s 2018 fictional work, Écoute, Emilia Pérez dives headfirst into a plethora of social issues, exploring their implications mostly through the eyes, bodies, and voices of women—especially the eponymous character, beautifully played by trans actor Karla Sofia Gascón; her lawyer, Rita Maria Castro (Saldaña); and Jessi, the wife she left behind (Gomez).  

Emilia, a ruthless former male drug lord named Manitas del Monte (both roles portrayed by Gascón), transitions to female with Rita’s help, “disappearing himself” to live as a woman. Jessi and his children, relocated to safety in Switzerland, believe him dead. But several years later, missing her family, Emilia asks Rita to bring them back to Mexico City, where she pretends to be Manitas’s sister. The ruse works, and Emilia’s life blossoms. To make amends for her sins, she creates the Lucecita Foundation, devoted to uncovering the fate of the cartel’s victims, and finds love with a woman. But when Jessi decides to marry an old flame and take the children away. Emilia’s violent side re-emerges, and Jessi retaliates—leading to an explosive conclusion.

Emilia Pérez embraces many genres—action, film noir, melodrama, and even the Western—along with the stylistic shifts associated with each. An atmospheric mise en scène and noir-like darkness suffuse the film, with its brooding chiaroscuro lighting, nighttime streets, and isolated, remote landscapes shot through with bursts of gunfire. Sunshine, despite the Mexican locale, remains its rarest commodity, and a sterile hospital is the film’s brightest setting.

But it is the film’s relation to the musical that has stood out, for that is the genre that enfolds and defines the others and remains rare in a contemporary dramatic film. Music and choreography push the narrative forward, define the protagonists, and express the most powerful emotions—although the songs themselves are not particularly memorable. Unlike the classic Hollywood iteration, in which musical numbers frequently became vehicles for expressing romantic feelings, here the personal and the political, love and danger, remain indelibly, explicitly intertwined.

Emilia Pérez features multiple types of musical structures. Like Umbrellas, it offers moments of conversational recitative, literal musical dialogues filled with arguments and resolutions, confessions and revelations. Rita sings many of her exchanges with Manitas/Emilia and with the doctors. A woman handing out flyers in search of a disappeared son relates her history in song. And, poignantly, Emilia’s daughter, cuddled against her, sings about how her “aunt” “smells like papa, leather, and café.”

Choruses can supply backup but also present a general view of “the people.” In “Aqui Estoy,” families of the disappeared—mothers, grandparents, siblings, children—sing why they must learn the fates of their loved ones. The camera travels from each person to the next, from story to story, until they come together in harmony—hundreds of faces symbolizing those lost to drug cartel violence.

Some numbers are conventional in style, but not content. A Berkeley-esque musical sequence unfolds in a hospital Rita considers for Manitas’s surgery: singing nurses wheel stretchers with patients ready for, or coming from, their cosmetic redo. The choreographed stretchers whirl around each other, creating patterns, dancing across the floor, culminating in a signature overhead shot. If Berkeley used such shots to turn female bodies into flowers, geometric shapes, and other abstract designs, here the objectification is twofold: stretchers form the choreographic canvas more than the supine humans, but the surgery itself generally helps the patients conform to rigorous social standards of beauty…

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Karen Backstein received her PhD from New York University and has taught cinema studies at various New York-area universities.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 2