Emilia Pérez is surprising and different. It’s a musical with color saturated visuals. It’s a story about Mexican drug cartels and dirty money. It’s a story about being who you are and what that can cost. It’s a story about redemption. There are some spoilers ahead.
Emilia Pérez was an unknown to me. I’d seen ads with Zoe Saldana as the star, so I planned to watch it. I was delighted and a bit amazed when it started and the characters began singing. Some of it was more like rhythmic rapping and I was thinking it might be something like Hamilton. The longer I watched, the more I realized this film can’t be compared to anything else. It’s unique.
The musical numbers are not so much sung as performed with voices. The choreography is different for each piece. One uses gurneys full of surgical patients, one uses stop motion with Zoe Saldana dancing among corrupt rich people, one is sung with blood soaked breath. The songs served the story.
The plot covers a little bit of everything. There’s action, romance, mystery, music, and a strong message about the power of being who you are. The film starts with Rita (Zoe Saldana), an unappreciated lawyer in Mexico City, getting a call promising a lot of money if she was at a news kiosk in 10 minutes. She was grabbed at the news stand and blindfolded. After a lengthy trip she was led into a room with Manitas.
Photo by Shanna Besson
Manitas was a drug kingpin in a Mexican cartel. He had a ton of money. He had a gorgeous wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and two kids. He had enough money to get whatever he wanted, and what he wanted (had always wanted) was to be a woman. He offered Rita millions of dollars to make it happen.
Rita found him doctors, surgeons, help. She took the money and moved on.
Four years later she was visiting with a gorgeous woman named Emilia Pérez at a dinner party in London and realized who she was. Karla Sofía Gascón played both Manitas and Emilia and gave stunning performances in both cases. She’s an impressive actress.
This is a film about a trans woman. It devotes some time to the before and during parts of the transition, but the film was more about Emilia living her best life afterwards. It’s a movie about a woman working to redeem her past.
After they meet again in London, Emilia asked Rita to help move Jessi and the children back to Mexico. Emilia would present herself to the children as their aunt and wanted them to live with her. Emilia wanted to use some of her drug millions to atone for her past. She created an organization to help find people who had disappeared (over 100,000 in Mexico alone) at the hands of the drug cartels.
Photo by page 114
Emilia meets Epifania (Adriana Paz) as part of that work and falls in love with her. Jessi, who hasn’t figured out who Emilia actually is, hangs out with Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). She wants to marry him and take the kids with her.
Things get dangerous, deadly in fact, after that. I knew from the start that the story would have a tragic ending. It was tragic but fitting.
The four women at the center of this played by Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Adriana Paz were all simply perfect. The emotion, the singing, the dancing, the danger, the need, and the redemption came through their performances in vivid detail. The film was over two hours long and I could have watched it for two more. Like Emilia Pérez herself, everything about the film was fascinating and beautiful. Violent and dangerous. Truthful.
The cinematography was unusual and added enormously to the uniqueness of the film. It has a look and style of its own. The use of light to isolate or emphasize was powerful. In one of the songs about the disappeared, lighted face after tiny lighted face shown against a field of black. So many faces.
Another scene stands out. Jessi and Gustavo were dancing in a club. They sang karaoke with a mirror behind them. The images in the mirror were not the same as what was in front of the mirror. Close, but slightly different with blurred edges and running colors, a multitude of images running back and back like in a hall of mirrors. It was mesmerizing.
It’s definitely unusual for a story like this one to be a musical, but I thought it worked.
The film was directed by Jacques Audiard. He’s a French director but the film is mostly in Spanish. It’s streaming on Netflix.
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