Emily Perez | Jacques Audiard | ★★★★★
Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez is a miracle of a film.
It shouldn’t exist; yet it does, and it is a beautiful, audacious, and life-affirming thrill that makes the soul dance.
Zoe Saldaña plays Rita, a smart and ambitious aide to a hapless lawyer stuck watching her career die in the hands of lesser men. Her introduction comes in a vibrant, pulse-pounding number that could be right out of The Forty-Second Street.
As we meet her, she’s the defence for a man she knows is guilty. Around her, the city explodes with life, murder, and passion. Out of nowhere, a call from a mysterious, yet obviously dangerous outsider, promises immense wealth for a single job. Rita, uncertain, looks around her. She’s surrounded by cleaners (all women), who ask what she has left to lose.
The caller turns out to be Manito Del Monte, a vicious cartel lord with only one request: Rita must help them finish their gender reassignment surgery. “I have the sky, the land, and the power, but I do not have a song,” they lament. Their rebirth is as Emilia Perez, a new woman, with a new future ahead. To achieve this, Emilia must leave behind her family, who believe she is dead.
Where the story goes from there is best left unspoiled. I saw Emilia Perez cold. I only knew it was a film by Audiard, a filmmaker with a peculiar sense of humor. From the first musical number, I knew I was seeing something special.
None of it is naturalistic, and that’s the point. In the musical genre, the rules are: You sing when you can’t talk, and dance when you can’t sing. They are releases from the anxiety. In Audiard’s world, everyone lives in a state of barely holding on. Emilia is a crime lord who wants to do start over; Rita a lawyer who negotiates compromises with her values daily. Their songs explode vibrantly and without warning, bottled deep inside a shell they’ve built to survive the mundane.
And what songs they are! From pitter-patter to folk songs; lamentations to modern dance numbers. Each one an impressive delight. Yet they’re not interested in catchiness, though many will resonate for years to come. They’re more in line with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Another classic French film, where all the dialog is song. It highlights the mundane to remind us of that which we rarely cherish. In Emilia Perez, even the details of an upcoming surgery turn into song. You just have to go with it. Sometimes words just aren’t enough.
This is Saldaña’s best work of her career, a tremendously nuanced performance that ranges from show-stopping song and dance to muted anger at the injustice of the world. Equally brilliant is Karla Sofía Gascón, who makes a spellbinding turn as both Del Monte and Perez. These are two unique characters, yet they are also the same. In a daring move, Audiard asks how much we keep of ourselves as we transition (in more ways than one) into different stages of our life.
Selena Gomez plays Jessi, Del Monte’s wife, left alone after his death. She was only a child when the two wed, and she’s never had a chance to live another life. Even in death, Del Monte’s ghost haunts her. She is only her own woman when she breaks the rules he set in stone years earlier. Gomez does wonders with her small role, imbuing Jessi with deep anguish and childlike rebellion. She is, after all, almost a child. The only one not allowed to move to the next life, whatever it may be.
There are momentous sequences in Emilia Perez. Most of them are musical, but many simply the stillness between characters. There is a meet-cute between two women as they compare the weapons they carry that is at first funny, then deeply distressing. That juxtaposition carries through the film. Everything lives in symbiosis, the horror and the beauty. Families of murder victims sing about how they need to lay their sorrow to rest. In another room, at the same time, the killers sing about how this is the first stone on the path they build towards salvation.
Emilia Perez is a story of transitions. It asks what forgiveness looks like throughout the ages, and how much one must suffer before they earn it. All the leads are damned souls, yet they haven’t achieved it alone. Audiard blends together melodrama, telenovela, and epic drama as he weaves the destinies of these three women into one. The result is a hypnotic concoction, a maximalist opera mixed with cartel drama; as if Bob Fosse directed Sicario.
It is unlike anything I’ve seen, and one of the best films of the year. It asks a lot from the audience, from the unlikely story to the untraditional song numbers, yet it rewards them in return with something truly unique.
[…] Read my full review here. […]