Emilia Pérez

Emilia Pérez, representing France, is the current frontrunner for the International Feature Oscar. It is also one of this year's weirdest movie musicals; it's not the weirdest because we have Better Man to look forward to. What can you expect if you check it out on Netflix?

Jacques Audiard expanded a side character from Boris Razon's novel Écoute (Listen) into this film's central character. Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) starts the movie as "Manitas" Del Monte, a notorious Mexican cartel kingpin. Secretly undergoing hormone replacement therapy, the gruff Manitas hires Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), an attorney stuck defending abusive men, to help complete the gender transition. Rita will get a good payday if she finds a good surgeon and relocates Manitas's sons and wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), to Switzerland. Rita does that, and Emilia Pérez takes the stage.

A few years later, Emilia reunites with Rita and hires her to bring her former family back to Mexico City. Since Manitas faked "his" death, Emilia introduces herself as her own cousin. Emilia becomes a philanthropist who enlists contrite sicarios to help locate victims of the drug war. She also begins a relationship with the widow of one such victim, Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz); however, she also becomes quite jealous when Jessi reunites with an old flame, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez). Rita, meanwhile, is stuck in the middle of it all.

What makes it weird is the mood whiplash. Imagine if Sicario turned into Rent every few minutes, and you might get this film. There's not only a climactic shootout and a fiery car crash, but a Busby Berkley number where a Thai surgeon runs down the various gender transition surgeries. It's a fantastical movie - musicals are fantasies, by their very nature - that partially deals with the aftermath of actual gang violence. That makes for an interesting, yet disorienting mix. 

You'd almost think the gruff Manitas and the stunning Emilia are played by two different people. But you'd be wrong; as the credits show, both of them are Gascón. The makeup work that renders her into the manliest of men is nothing short of impressive. Her emotional transformation from brutal kingpin to loving aunt is mostly compelling; it's quite scary when her jealousy boils over near the end. Has she truly redeemed herself? The climax begins when Jessi and Gustavo team-up to abduct Emilia, and the film doesn't tell us how they did it. 

Saldaña has the film's most entertaining number, El Mal, where Rita dances around a charity dinner and rants at how rotten its guests are. That and her earlier number, El alegato, perfectly convey her disgust with how rotten the world is. Her hesitancy to deal with her unusual job is understandable, especially when that involves getting snatched from the street by Manitas's goons. She's quite formidable when she mediates between Jessi and Emilia when their relationship deteriorates. She even organizes Emilia's rescue, which sadly doesn't end well.

The other leading ladies, who shared the Cannes Best Actress Award with Gascón and Saldaña, are also pretty good. Gomez, as Jessi, perfectly vocalizes her bottled-up grief in the showy Bienvenida number. Her anger towards Emilia is perfectly understandable, as is her shock once she finally realizes who she is. Paz makes the most of her fairly limited screentime as Epifanía. Her best scene is her introduction when she comes into Emilia's office to learn her husband's fate. Her fear turns into relief when she learns the news; her husband wasn't a nice man, at all. Her relationship with Emilia is pretty nice, even if it doesn't have much screentime.

El Mal is not only the highlight of the soundtrack, which was composed by Clément Ducol and Camille, but it's also the film's technical highlight. Cinematographer Paul Guilhaume rapidly dances around Rita as she dances around the dinner guests, while editor Juliette Welfing gives the sequence a great tempo. Not only that, but the sounds of shuffling dancers give the song some great punctuation. All these elements add up to a weirdly memorable musical sequence. In fact, most of the other songs and their choreography are pretty good, even if they're also pretty weird. The best of the slower numbers is when Jessi and Emilia officially reunite.

Emilia Pérez is a baffling film, but it's also undeniably unforgettable. Its acting and its technicals will dance in your memories long after its 132 minutes are over. I wonder what other films might accompany it on the International Feature Oscar ballot. Whatever they may be, I'll try to get to as many as I can. In the meantime, check out Emilia Pérez if you want a unique movie musical. I can recommend a few other movie musicals if its tonal mixture isn't appealing. I might review a few more before the year is out.

That's it for now.