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| Director Jacques Audiard |
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| Audiard on the set |
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| Audiard on the set with Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón |
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| Audiard with Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón |
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| Cannes award winners |
EMILIA PÉREZ B+ France Belgium (132 mi) 2024
If he’s a wolf, he’ll be a wolf.
A defiantly original film about personal and social transformation, as expressed by a Mexican drug cartel leader’s change of identity through a sex change operation, kind of like Juan Perón’s power transforming into Eva Perón, as expressed through an audacious rock opera musical reminiscent of Evita (musical). A trans musical seems like an apt choice during yet another run-in with the virulently homophobic Donald Trump, spewing fear and hatred that transgender people must deal with on a daily basis, which requires a social transformation to rid the country of the toxic stench he has left us with. The film debuted at Cannes, where it received a nine-minute standing ovation, not uncommon, but also more rousing applause at the press conference, which is unheard of, winning the Jury Prize (3rd Place) and combined Best Actress awards for Adriana Paz, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Zoe Saldaña. As if hatched from the imagination of Pedro Almodóvar, four powerful Spanish-speaking women are at the center of this picture, and not just any ordinary women, but overlooked women who defy expectations with a fierce independent streak that breaks through the restricting walls of societal convention, finding new ground, new transformations, creating a challenging experience for viewers, where the melodramatic overreach may astound some and piss off others, effortlessly switching between the searing drama of Mexico’s brutal drug wars and rousing musical numbers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Even the locations can be deceiving, as the film was not made in Mexico, as it appears, but in Paris studios, where the director had more control integrating the dance numbers. It cannot be emphasized enough that this is a Spanish-language movie made by a French director who doesn’t speak Spanish, using a mostly foreign cast, where the boldness of the artistic vision comes from the mind of Jacques Audiard, a defining filmmaker of our generation and an ardent social realist with films like The Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeu... (2005), 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet ... (2009), Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os) (2011), winning the Palme d’Or with Dheepan (2015), and more recently 2021 #6 Film of the Year Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades, Paris 13e). Loosely adapted from Le Monde editor Boris Razon's 2018 novel Écoute, where a minor character is a transgender drug dealer, and perhaps inspired by the experimental approach to emotional extremes in Léos Carax’s audacious rock opera ANNETTE (2021), this is part of the filmmaker’s ongoing quest to explore new cinematic forms, with a unique mixture of tension, amped up emotions, and social relevance, where Audiard along with Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi, and Léa Mysius developed the screenplay from what Audiard originally intended to be an opera libretto in four acts, with original songs by French pop musician Camille Dalmais, an original score by her partner Clément Ducol, and choreography by Damien Jamet. Recalling Kornél Mundruczó’s experimental operatic film JOHANNA (2005), this is filtered through the stream-of-conscience, poetic realism of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) (1964) and the kaleidoscopic, avant-garde modernism of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979). Nothing can prepare you for this intoxicating movie adventure, an exhilarating experience when seen in theaters, literally a cinema of flamboyant excess, finding an expressive language that can only be captured in cinema, where particularly memorable is cinematographer Paul Guilhaume’s swirling 35mm camera, which would be extremely paired down in size and scale if streamed on Netflix, where each viewer brings their own individual experience into this bombastic encounter. Taking bold creative leaps, audaciously mixing pop opera, a narco thriller, and a gender affirmation drama, using brightly lit colors, continuous camera movements, and the most striking rhythmic choreographies, with Audiard becoming a master of emotional storytelling, as unpredictable as life itself, this is a film that grabs hold of you and never lets go, doing something very special and unique, co-produced by the Dardenne brothers and none other than the House of Saint Laurent.
Moving freely between characters, the film opens with Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a sharp attorney who is disillusioned with the system, sick of her secondary role, doing all the legwork behind the scenes while others receive the spotlight and adulation that she earned, but never receives, while also tired of keeping guilty affluent clients from being convicted, like enabling a domestic abuser to go free after murdering his wife, so in something of a surprise move she finds herself abducted and offered an extremely lucrative job working for the leader of a ruthless Mexican drug cartel who has an interesting proposition. With the chance to earn money beyond her dreams, where she’ll be set up for life, she is tasked with navigating his way through a botched, under-the-table sex change operation, becoming a story about a woman trapped in a man’s body, helping him stage his fake death, where the film accentuates the emotional fallout and repercussions of living under a cloud of deception and lies, becoming a movie about discovering the truth about yourself. Starring Spanish transgender actress Karla Sofia Gascón, the first openly trans performer to win an award at Cannes, who has a long history acting in Mexican telenovelas, as the notorious druglord Manitas Del Monte transformed into her authentic true self, Emilia Pérez, this is a visually dazzling, gender-affirming thriller where in a moment’s notice characters break out into song or eye-popping dance numbers, providing a breathtaking energy that defies anything we’ve ever seen, dealing with themes of homosexuality, opportunism, crime, injustice, lovelessness, loneliness, betrayal, and solidarity. Unlike the Bob Fosse approach of uninterrupted dance routines that accentuates the dexterity of the dancers, this prefers a quick-cutting editing method, which is more of a music video style that epitomizes the fractured psychological mindset of the characters, literally upending all expectations with ingenious plot twists, dazzling spectacle, and inspired musical detours, revealing the qualities of the telenovelas, which are so successful in Mexico, where this stylized potpourri is a means to express the dreams and anxieties of an entire culture struggling against corruption, violence, and fear. One of the most fascinating aspects is how Audiard is able to transmit the different stages of Emilia’s journey, with the changing modulation of tones, plunging the viewer into different psychological mindsets, creating a balance between dark humor and emotional complexity. While Audiard brings hard-edged arthouse credentials, known for profound character studies, innovative narrative techniques, and strong visual language, often featuring tortured male characters who operate through deceit and violence, where a common thread in all his films is having to make tough ethical choices and then living with the consequences. His films carry considerable philosophical weight, having studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne with the intention of becoming a teacher, but he instead transitioned to cinema, starting out as an assistant editor on Roman Polanski’s THE TENANT (1976), where he is now generally regarded as the heir to the French cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville and Henri-Georges Clouzot. One of the more emotionally fraught scenes is the personal confession of Manitas before the surgery, revealing to Rita his longtime desire to transition and live openly as the woman she knows herself to be, which is the point we realize he’s not using gender-affirming surgery as a plot device for criminal schemes, but is a genuine longing for authenticity, as she wants to live the life she always felt was inside her, exploring the joys and challenges that can follow a transition, acknowledging that as a man, he “never wanted to desire and never wanted to be desired.” Advocating for the surgery, Rita responds with her own uniquely compelling lyrics, “Changing the body changes the soul/Changing the soul changes society/Changing society changes everything!”
Rita manages to pull everything off, finding a distinguished doctor abroad who emphasizes that while he can help facilitate a change in physical appearance, it’s up to each individual patient to alter their psychological mindset, as otherwise they will remain stuck in the same unhappy mental framework, while also setting up bank accounts for Manitas’ wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her two young children, ushering them off to Switzerland, out of danger from rival cartels, yet even they are oblivious to what has happened. Viewers, however, are privy to the transformation, along with Rita as the only one who knows, where one central theme that stands out is whether someone can really escape their past completely, as Emilia is unable to sever existing relationships and attitudes, bringing Jessi and the kids back to a large compound in Mexico City, passing herself off as an affluent, distant aunt in order to have them closer to her, where in the words of Faulkner in one of his best-known lines from Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” Somewhere in that tangled universe this film exists, leaving us to make of it what we will. One of the lingering questions Audiard answers is whether a straight director can tell trans stories without bringing ingrained stereotypical prejudices and cliché’s. Just as important is the accuracy of Audiard’s portrayal of Mexico, a patriarchal machismo society where women are often voiceless and have to endure a great deal of violence, yet at the same time they are also the ones who hold everything together with their love, empathy, resilience, and, ultimately, hope. The fact that Manitas wants to become a woman encapsulates these very contradictions, making this an unequivocally Mexican tale largely told in Spanish, one that embodies the very essence of the country, both in narrative and form, and raises complex, even controversial questions. Taking things further, the triumph of the film is the unwavering strength of the four featured women in such dramatically different roles, where their appeal is universal, as recognized by the Cannes jury. The film also highlights the plight of families trying to find the tens of thousands of missing people, or desaparecidos (Families in Latin America demand justice for the disappeared), whose murders have been hidden across Latin America, while over 100,000 people have disappeared just in Mexico over the last 10 years. By attempting to right the wrongs in her life and make amends for the brutality of her former sins, finding an undercurrent of regret that shades her character, Emilia discovers Epifanía (Adriana Paz), an abused wife who helps her rediscover the rewards of love and tenderness and desire, which feels like a breath of fresh air, adding a softer element to the surrounding tragedy, with an emergence of a self she can finally recognize as her own, leading a campaign for truth and social justice, where the manner in which Audiard interweaves these stories is truly innovative. But Jessi longs for love and a glamorous life, believing Manitas to be dead, so she moves on with her life, right into the arms of another drug lord in Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez), something Emilia can’t bear to watch, as she’s still jealous and possessive, where her past eventually catches up to her, facing a fascinating moral conundrum. Gascón offers a particularly soulful performance, while the film is a Shakespearean-level tragedy that grapples with questions of love, identity, forgiveness, and grief, where the unique style is as eye-opening as the emotionally gripping yet revelatory subject matter, where the film helps normalize a frequently targeted and systemically marginalized group.
Guillermo del Toro & Jacques Audiard discuss Emilia Pérez ... YouTube (19:58)
