Review: Emilia Pérez

Director:  Jacques Audiard

Stars:  Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón

There are arthouse filmmakers whose acclaim I’m often at a loss to understand, and Jacques Audiard is frequently among them. While A Prophet more-or-less lived up to its breakout praise back in 2009, the work since has been spotty at best. Dheepan, for instance, amounts to the probably the most forgettable Palme d’Or winner of the past decade. Rust and Bone and The Sisters Brothers both fared well with critics, but left me cold. Only the recent (and relatively uncelebrated) Paris, 13th District seemed worthy of even a second look. It’s taken me a while to sit down with Emilia Pérez. Partly because of the above. Partly because my local Picturehouse reneged on showing it (a perpetual complaint this season). And partly because, for all the raves out of Cannes, there seemed an equal number of voices decrying the film, particularly it’s substandard understanding of the lived experience of trans people.

Why is this relevant? Mounted as a noirish musical, Emilia Pérez focuses on the tribulations of a Mexico City drug cartel boss, refracted through the lens of beleaguered defense lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña). While it’s a joy to see Saldaña out of green make-up or blue digital enhancement, inhabiting her natural skin, Audiard has her in service of a sordid, all-thumbs narrative that sees Rita headhunted by the notorious Juan ‘Manitas’ Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) who is seeking to transition through gender-affirming surgeries into her preferred persona, Emilia Pérez.

When Rita asks whether ‘Manitas’ wants to change their lifestyle or their sex, the response is a fairly flippant “What’s the difference?”. Even as a relative outsider to the trans community, this response seems particularly ignorant from a layperson’s perspective. And while it could be construed that ‘Manitas’ genuinely doesn’t have the mental capacity for the question, further stumbles in the script to do with the nature of HRT (for starters) suggest a more pronounced and integral failing from the film’s creators. Emilia Pérez is not above ‘Manitas’ flashing Rita vulgarly to show-off treatments-in-progress, or even wheeling patients around in sync while making a laundry-list of their various ‘plasty’s at a Bangkok clinic. There’s also a heavy suggestion that the true intention here is not to live a life in tune with Emilia’s lifelong nature, but to simply escape the moral prison of a criminal underworld. Transition as an escape hatch. This accumulation of ‘off’ beats more or less put the nails in the movie’s coffin before it’s gotten off the ground.

Audiard and choreographer Damien Jalet inject smidgens of urgency and drama into the peppered-in musical numbers (often through turning lights off), most of which are brief affectations that ultimately feel at-odds with the grubbier, nastier, more violently-minded scenes that make up a majority of the picture. The musical elements seem like a naked attempt to carve out an idiosyncratic identity for a crime picture struggling to achieve one otherwise. They’re slightly reminiscent of the genre’s sometimes-strained application in Leos Carax and Sparks’ collaboration Annette. But where that film’s creative team went all-in on their forlorn rock opera, Emilia Pérez is far less convincing. Instead of an inspired match-up it feels contrived and histrionic ala Joker: Folie à Deux. Is the insinuation, also, that trans stories need ‘camping up’? Audiard’s film doesn’t exactly escape the question.

Emilia Pérez doesn’t seem to intentionally make these mistakes. Indeed, it is stiflingly earnest in its attempts to right the world’s wrongs through blunt acknowledgement of their existence. This puts it in the same overbearing company as the likes of Oscar-bait ‘successes’ like Crash (2004) or Green Book (2018), expectant of handouts for being aware of the ills of society. As much ire as one might muster for its uncouth aspects concerning trans representation, the far more common criticism one might level at Emilia Pérez is that it is dull. A trudge through what could have been inherently interesting ground rendered banal by Audiard’s broad-stroke approach. Not even Selena Gomez can inject a little fire into proceedings when she appears, here and there, as the former kingpin’s ex-wife Jessi. 

In the film’s second half, when Emilia and Rita are reunited, they are inspired to set up an altruistic community outreach program – an NGO – an idea directly vocalised by Rita as a way for Emilia to make up for her violent past (the region’s disappeared children singing to camera as disembodied heads ala the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video plays like a crude telethon VT). The halves of the film are delineated, simplistically, into Man=Bad and Woman=Good (particularly via Gascón’s vocal performance). Or, if not Good, duty-bound to Atone for the Crimes of Man. So, even here, in what ought to be the film’s more positive stretch, it feels reductive, didactic and compromised. And if there were any momentum it has, by this point, long since faded. Getting to the end involves navigating a contrived kidnapping yarn and feels, frankly, time-consuming. 

I did my best, in the end, to try to approach Emilia Pérez fairly, with optimism that its detractors might be being reactionary, and with the hope that Audiard’s recent creative success with Paris, 13th District might have carried over and somehow informed this curious swerve. Alas, that positivity was quite thoroughly crushed simply through spending time with it. Having it wear me down.

There are likely to be a great number of prestige pictures asking for your attention over the coming months. At this time, Emilia Pérez feels like the least deserving of them. I.e., it is positively at home now that it’s sat on Netflix for you to ignore.