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Whether you ultimately enjoy Emilia Perez, the latest from renegade writer/director Jacques Audiard (A Prophet, Rust and Bone), or not, there’s no getting around the fact that you likely have seen nothing like it before and that it has more ambition in its telling than most films released this year. And while ambition alone is never enough of a reason for me to recommend any film (see Megalopolis, or don’t), combine that with an unhinged performance by Spanish-born trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón (a huge star in Mexican films and soap operas), and you get a film that takes risks, dares to be divisive (it almost demands it), and finds way to defy conventions to the point where it might get rejected by the very community it wants to profile. Did I mention it’s also a musical?
Gascón begins the film as male drug cartel leader Manitas Del Monte, who has decided to fake their own death and undergo gender-confirmation surgery to finally live life as the person they were born to be, Emilia Perez. To help facilitate the entire process and make sure Manitas’ family is taken care of, they hire Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer fed up with defending men getting away with crimes against women in court. She makes certain that Manitas' wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their kids are financially secure, but years after the surgery, Emilia pops into their lives as a philanthropist, heading a nonprofit group that investigates the disappearances of family members in Mexico for those looking for lost loved ones. She finds a way to have Jessi and her children live with her, even though they have no idea who she used to be.
A two-time winner at Cannes and based on a novel by Boris Razon, Emilia Perez gets messy when Jessi starts dating a new man and Emilia finds a potential love interest in Epifania (Adriana Paz), a woman searching for her family, whose disappearance may have something to do with who Emilia used to be. As for the musical aspect of the film, the singing isn’t always on key, and the lyrics are occasionally questionable, but the music does the job of any solid musical by allowing the free-flowing emotions to pop off the screen in ways I certainly wasn’t expecting. Gascón’s performance is big and bold, with just enough melodrama to verify that her soap opera background serves her well. Both Saldaña and Gomez show an angrier side to themselves than we normally see in their work, and it suits them.
If we pull Paz into this remarkable group of characters who serve as the leads of Emilia Perez, we get a strangely unconventional feminist tale of four trapped women each seeking a type of escape and contentment outside the world of men. And it’s only because of that veiled message that the movie occasionally works. It’s also batshit crazy, sometimes resulting in the highest form of cringe. Audiard has always been a risk-taker, and often the results are phenomenal; that isn’t the case here, but there are elements of Emilia Perez that I found stunning, for a variety of reasons.
The film is now playing in theaters and available to stream on Netflix.
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