“Emilia Pérez” is not a Mexican film. That much is clear. It is not really about Mexico, but rather offers the context of the embattled country as a backdrop for his musical fantasy, interested in a character who tries to cross the line between cruelty and tenderness. Watching “Emilia Pérez” is like tasting a combination of substances that have not been put together before, where you are first surprised by the bizarre taste, but you still take a sip. It’s a deliriously rhapsodic concoction, sometimes ridiculous in what the lyrics of the Spanish-language songs want to convey, and others quite poignant.
This narco-opera is not Mexican, not only because writer-director Jacques Audiard is French, but also because it was shot almost entirely on Parisian soundstages where the streets of Mexico City were recreated for scenes with an international cast. Even the source material: a chapter in Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Ecoute– is foreign. The result of all these layers that it strips away from Mexico is a hyper-curated, phantasmagoric melodrama from the mind of an artist who has no direct connection to the country in which he has chosen to set his fiction. That built-in detachment is perhaps what makes “Emilia Pérez” so messily untethered.
And yet there are plenty of aspects that Audiard allows into his emotionally heightened frames that at least imply a desire for a quasi-authentic representation – to the extent that his outsider view and artistic ambitions allow that. A TV screen shows young women protesting femicides on the streets of Mexico City. The sensational newspapers typical of Mexican newsstands – on the front pages there are gruesome photos of cruel acts – and the loudspeaker of scrap metal collection enrich the environment of this replica. There’s a constant, fascinating friction between the film’s inherent, often overwhelming artificiality and Audiard’s sincere attempt to unfold something truthful about the pursuit of redemption and self-preservation.
The woman who gives the film its title exists in the body of Karla Sofía Gascón, a trans Spanish actress who found success in Mexican films and soap operas long before she transitioned. Most notably, Gascón played the male antagonist in one of Mexico’s biggest domestic blockbusters, 2013’s ‘Nosotros los Nobles’ (‘We Are the Nobles’). Now Gascón impressively uses her acting range and her singing voice in a dual role, first as Manitas Del Monte, a feared drug lord with gender dysphoria, and later as Emilia Pérez, a philanthropist whose nonprofit organization helps families search for their missing loved ones.
This new post-transition facet reflects her desire for reconciliation as the person responsible for many of these losses. Within the same lifetime, the perpetrator desperately tries to become the Paladin, but her long-standing sins did not die when she buried that other version of herself. Her desire to avoid responsibility at all costs poisons her freedom. A paradox emerges from the way Emilia moves through the world as her true self, as she will brutally wield her power to secure the kindness and unconditional affection she so deeply desires. Apparently, ruthlessness is not exclusively a male trait.
To help with the logistics of her transition, Manitas hires Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer who is tired of defending men she knows are guilty of crimes against women. However, her consciousness does not stop her from succumbing to the temptation of a financially lavish life on the other side of her illegal assignment. The job also involves placing Manita’s wife Jessi (an unashamedly raw Selena Gomez) and her two children in Switzerland. The musical numbers add up quickly and primarily in Saldaña’s voice and choreographed movements in sequences that often involve an ensemble surrounding her, as if the extended numbers are swallowing the world around them in their seductive, bewildering whirlwind.
As contrived as some of the lines in these songs are, Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume soften their implementation in part by finding a middle ground between precision and erratic kinetic energy in the numbers, sometimes striving for symmetry while sometimes surrendering to chaos. At their most intimate, these renditions are enchanting.
There is a heartbreaking seriousness in Manita’s delicate operatic singing for Rita before she undergoes multiple operations, longing for a gentleness that his existence in a hyper-masculine environment denied him. While Saldaña is the consistent standout in a performance that defies expectations, she completely ignores the intentional unnaturalness of the format. Her turn relies on facial expressions that continually negate guilt about her involvement and the macro implications of what Rita knows about Emilia’s past.
Then there’s the matter of language in “Emilia Pérez,” in which none of the three protagonists speak with a Mexican accent. Although Audiard himself does not speak Spanish, I must admit my surprise at the use of colloquial language, thanks to whoever translated the text; that’s more than most American productions set anywhere in Latin America can say (note “Sicario”). Furthermore, Audiard does not try to pass off the characters of Saldaña and Gomez as women born and raised in Mexico. Through dialogue, Rita reveals that she grew up in the Dominican Republic, and Jessi hints at a likely Mexican-American background when she invokes her sister in the United States. The casting then becomes a new piece in this glamorous pastiche.
It’s fitting then that the only Mexican performer in the main ensemble, Adriana Paz, plays an understated character and the only one without blood on her hands: Epifania, Emilia’s new love interest in search of a missing relative. I didn’t go into “Emilia Pérez” looking for the kind of introspective, searing humanism that Mexican filmmakers like Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero delivered with “Identifying Features” and now “Sujo.” Realist dramas are not about the violence, but about the way its consequences create eternal victims, born of their own understanding of the Mexican imaginary. Those are the voices worth supporting for such narrative work.
Mexican audiences have become accustomed to American perspectives that exploit narco-related disorders for stories that fail to address their root causes. Questioning the intentions of those productions will always be valid. But to criticize Audiard for participating in the common film practice of telling stories in a way other than what is immediately familiar to him seems an oversimplification.
Yet it is true that the reach of “Emilia Pérez,” given the Hollywood names attached to it and that it has Netflix as a distributor, is incomparable to what independent, arthouse Mexican productions can hope for. More people will watch Audiard’s vision of a Mexico in turmoil than Mexicans, and therein lies a greater concern about which art is defended and which is not. For all its tantalizing aesthetic and thematic components, “Emilia Pérez” has a seductive lushness, derived from that over-the-top saturation of hammered-in ideas coupled with dazzling and dizzying visuals. Like synthetic flavor extracts, there is no real fruit in them, but the feelings they evoke, both positive and negative, are true.
