2024 | starring Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez, Edgar Ramirez | directed by Jacques Audiard | 2h 12m | in Spanish with Subtitles | 2 out of 5 stars |
There is a lot going on in Emilia Perez, an almost indescribable Spanish drug cartel musical directed and co-written by Jacques Audiard (A Prophet). It’s a busy movie, that sings and dances and stages elaborate, surreal musical numbers that take the to-the-audience staging of a play mixed with the visual iconography of a movie. I would argue that it’s that busy to cover up for a story that isn’t that deep. At all.
A talented and underappreciate lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldana) is hired by a drug cartel kingpin, Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascon) to find a good doctor, that will help Mantias transition into a woman, fake his death and disappear from the cartel world. Years later Manitas comes back into Rita’s life as Emilia Perez (Gascon) who wants to reunite with her children, unbeknownst to her ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez), and partner with Rita again to establish a charity to help missing victims of cartel violence.
Before we get into all of this, let’s talk about bias. Obviously, a critic can’t be non-biased. That’s not possible, you like what you like, you connect with things you connect with. From my perspective, being non-biased and fair means to meet the movie with what it’s trying to do, not what you want it to do and, most importantly, not let a single dominant aspect poison and overwhelm an entire production. It’s truly rare to hand out a 1 here because even movies with dumb stories, bad acting and god-forbid even plot-holes, often still have some basic filmmaking merit to them. That for me, is Emilia Perez, even given the numerous aspects of this movie that I hated, I also have to acknowledge a base level of filmmaking competence here, from the staging of the musical numbers to Saldana’s performance to the visual creativity of some of it.
Ok, now that is out of the way, this movie is garbage. Just talking about the oil-and-water genre mix of Red One’s action movie Christmas fantasy, I don’t know who a brutal drug cartel musical is made for, with both sides seemingly turned off by the other. Your average gang warfare movie sure doesn’t want to watch a transgender musical; and your average musical fan doesn’t want to see something as violent and grim as Emilia Perez becomes. Aside from the opening number, which sets the stage in a classic Broadway sort of way and a wacky sequence where Saldana’s character sings her way around a hospital that specializes in gender transitions, none of the music in this movie is good and none of it is catchy. This isn’t like a musical that dips into song every now and then, it’s like an opera. It’s in a near-constant, grating, dialog-as-song mode.
Then there are the 3 leads. As mentioned, Zoe Saldana is doing something of a star-turn here, showing a fun musical side after years of action movie dominance under creature make-up. Her numbers are the best, in that they are at least the most impressively choreographed (“Vaginaplasty” and the banquet hall number). Everyone else in the movie is terrible. Gascon is terrible and Gomez is terrible. Gascon seems as if she’s reading lines off a cue card and Gomez swallows a bad Spanish accent.
All the characters here are underwritten. Rita is a character with a set-up and no payoff, Emilia, a payoff with no set-up. Everyone is inert, with little agency or accountability in their own story. This is Identity Politics: The Movie. In an early number we see how Rita is disrespected at her firm because she’s a woman and then she sings that she can’t start her own firm because she’s black. For her part, Emilia Perez is anointed for sainthood by the film. This is a perfect character without flaws, and even what you might call flaws are passed off by the movie as just “wanting love”. She starts a charity because of her everlasting kindness so the movie’s middle section can turn into a full-blown The More You Know PSA for cartel kidnappings. That’s the point where Emilia Perez switches from being a bad musical to a bad drug cartel thriller. Melodramatic to the hilt.
Imagine if maybe a quality that made Manitas such a successful cartel leader bled over into his life as Emilia. Maybe she was hot-headed or impulsive or greedy? You know a logical flaw for a drug cartel leader that would make her character interesting. She slips back into the life of her ex (Gomez) and lies to them about who she is and the movie is totally ok with that. Then there is the ending, which I can’t imagine anyone liking even if you’re completely on board with everything this movie is selling up until that point. It’s needlessly cruel simply to manipulate the audience into sympathizing with Emilia again. I hated it.
Emilia Perez is a movie about identity that wears other people’s around like a skin suit. It’s a movie about Mexican culture made by a 70-year-old Frenchman and staring 2 Americans. It tots around in broad stereotypes. It mixes genres, not out of a love for all of them, but as an attempt to liven up the elements that don’t work. Way too longer, way too indulgent in fashionable topes and way too self-serious, Emilia Perez is one of 2024’s most pretentious movies.