Phrases like “game-changer” and “cutting-edge” can’t capture just how audacious and original Emilia Pérez is. I daresay it wouldn’t or couldn’t have been made, or even conceived, just ten years ago. (Maybe five…) I am determined to praise and discuss it without giving too much away. Here goes: Emilia Pérez is a crime thriller that boils over into melodrama, laced with violent action. It has been described as operatic, which makes particular sense when you learn that it is punctuated with a dozen musical numbers. I would love to have been a fly on the wall when filmmaker Jacques Audiard auditioned this idea for his backers.
Zoe Saldaña gives an excellent performance as a lawyer who has become bored with her work, making her a perfect choice to take on a formidable and dangerous assignment: to help a brutal Mexican drug kingpin disappear from sight—even from his wife and two children—and live the rest of his life as a woman. Both iterations of that character are played by trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón, who gives the breakthrough performance of the year.
The film utilizes songs to help define its characters and their emotional state as the unpredictable story unfolds: from a tender bedside recitation to an anthem of liberation set to Busby Berkeley-like choreography. Composers Camille Dalmas and Clement Ducol deserve credit for sheer versatility…as well as the ability to write lyrics in Spanish when they (like the director) are French.
Audiard, whose notable work includes A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and The Beat My Heart Skipped, credits a novel by Boris Razon with the inspiration to make this one-of-a-kind picture, which he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegain, Léa Mysius, and Nicolas Livecchi. He has gone on record as saying he is not a fan of musicals, and he hasn’t paid attention to the genre’s conventions at all. His unique and compelling picture defies pigeonholing. And if the narrative has some lulls, well into its two-hour-plus running time, it’s a minor complaint given the exhilaration it provides overall.
The cast wrings every drop of emotion from the screenplay, at reflective moments as well as sequences where every feeling is dramatically heightened, and always with purpose. Kudos to Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, and a late-arriving Édgar Ramírez for delivering on the promise of Audiard’s wild ideas. Emilia Pérez is a knockout.