If there was one word to describe Emilia Perez, it would be bizarre. It is hard to box this Spanish-language film about a Mexican cartel boss employing a lawyer to transition into a woman so that she can live a life away from the cartel into any one genre. And that is both the film’s strength and its weakness.
French director Jacques Audiard has rolled a gritty crime thriller with daytime soap opera, added a little bit of dark humour and capped it off as a musical, making Emilia Perez messy, gripping, weird and entirely unexpected. Who would have thought a feared cartel leader could break into song about feeling like he belonged to not just the wrong world but also the wrong body after having had a lawyer kidnapped and brought to him?
When we first meet Emilia — played by Spanish trans actor Karla Sofia Gascón — she is a he, a feared cartel kingpin called Juan ‘Manitas’ Del Monte who has been secretly undergoing hormone therapy and wants to transition to a woman with gender-affirming surgery. He kidnaps Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana), an under-appreciated lawyer who is disillusioned with working for scumbag clients who get richer while she earns pittance.
Rita is tasked with making all the arrangements for the transition, from finding a doctor willing to perform the surgery to faking Manitas’s death and relocating his wife Jesse (Selena Gomez) and their two children, all for a stupendous sum of money. All of this is done through song-and-dance numbers (including a song about vaginoplasty), most of which is pretty forgettable.
Soon Emilia, who is now a rich benefactress, wants her children back in her life and has Rita relocate Jessie and the kids from Switzerland to Mexico, where she pretends to be Manitas’s cousin. Emilia soon starts an NGO where she works to locate the hundreds of thousands of missing persons lost to cartel violence, trying to make up for her past.
For a film that addresses a lot of important social issues, it is easy to feel conflicted on various levels. Does the narrative have to make a trans woman a killer in her past? In a song Emilia refers to herself as ‘half a he and half a she’, which feels ridiculously reductive. The children get shoved around from place to place by the parents and are hardly ever a consideration despite the song and dance of Emilia missing them terribly. Is working to locate victims of cartel violence to atone for Emilia’s violent past enough to sanctify her? Doesn’t the levity of song and dance undermine the seriousness of the issue of lives lost to cartel violence in Mexico? There are so many questions that don’t have excusable answers.
That is not to say that the film doesn’t have its moments or its positives. It is riotous and unpredictable with no one behaving the way they are expected to, which always keeps things interesting. The songs might not be anything that will have you humming, but the acting is stupendous. Zoe Saldana is absolutely electric in her performance as the put-upon-lawyer-turned-friend. Her song and dance sequences are brimming with energy, frustration and even, at times, justified anger. Gascón is magnetic as Emilia, embodying both confidence and vulnerability with equal aplomb. Even Gomez makes a mark as the bratty trophy wife who wants to eat her cake and have it too.
