In the floridly off-kilter “Emilia Pérez,” the director Jacques Audiard throws so much at you — gory crime-scene photos, a menacing cartel boss, a singing-and-dancing Zoe Saldaña — that you don’t dare blink, almost. Set largely in present-day Mexico City, the fast-track story follows a beleaguered lawyer, Rita (a very good Saldaña), who’s hired by a powerful drug lord, Manitas (a wonderful Karla Sofía Gascón), for an unusual job. Manitas, who presents as a man but identifies as a woman, wants help with clandestinely obtaining gender-affirming surgery and with tidying up some of the complications that come from a violent enterprise.
Audiard, a French filmmaker and critical favorite with a string of impressive credits, likes changing it up. He’s partial to people and stories on the margins, though is especially drawn to crime stories; much of one of his finest films, “A Prophet,” takes place in prison. He also likes dipping in and out of genres while playing with and, at times, undermining their conventions, embracing an unorthodoxy that can extend to his characters. The protagonist in “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” for one, is an outright thug but also a would-be concert pianist who, at one point, shows up at a recital bloodied after nearly beating another man to death.
The complications in “Emilia Pérez” emerge in quick succession. After the brisk, eventful opener — featuring a murder trial, an unjust verdict and two musical numbers — Rita is being driven to a secret location by armed strangers, her head shrouded. Before long, she is seated in a truck, face to face with Manitas, a jefe with facial tattoos, a stringy curtain of hair and an ominously threatening whisper. Manitas delivers a staccato, tuneless rap that promises Rita “considerable sums of money” in exchange for her help. “I want to be a woman,” Manitas reveals sotto voce through soft lips and a mouthful of golden teeth.
Rita agrees to help, though there’s little to suggest that she could deny Manitas’s request. To that end, Rita begins jetting around the world looking for a discreet, willing surgeon for Manitas, an expedition that, during one stop, finds her in a circular-shaped Bangkok clinic where she, the surgical team and gowned, bandaged patients are soon singing and striking poses. As Rita and a surgeon discuss options for Manitas, the doctor begins sing-chanting words like “mammaplasty” and “vaginoplasty” and “laryngoplasty,” which others pick up as a refrain. As bodies and the camera spin inside the clinic, Audiard cuts to an overhead shot of the facility, exuberantly tapping into his inner Busby Berkeley.
The song-and-dance numbers — the score and songs are by Clément Ducol and Camille, and the choreography is by Damien Jalet — range from the intimate to the outsized, and are integrated throughout. Most seem like manifestations of private thoughts, as in an early number in which Rita voices aloud a trial argument that she’s mentally prepping while in a grocery store. When she exits into the jeweled city night, she is met by a rising rumble of voices from passers-by who are chanting “rising and falling.” As she walks on, her words shift into song, her movements become stylized, and the passers-by turn into an ensemble. Audiard then begins folding in images of Rita typing on a laptop as she sings.
At first, this shift between inner and outer realities, between the ostensibly material world of contemporary Mexico and the metaphysical world of the characters, is jarring and amusing. From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect. Yet while Audiard has productively combined classic genres and present-day sensibilities before, even the more personal, confessional numbers here add little more than novelty. It’s galvanizing when Rita belts a song — to herself, to us — about the corruption of Mexican leaders assembled at a banquet, but only because the movie is acknowledging a world that it otherwise uses as a fanciful stage.
Audiard steadily maintains the accelerated pace that he has set from the get-go, and in short order Rita is enjoying her cartel paycheck and a heavily bandaged Manitas is waking up in a clinic abroad. She adopts a new name, Emilia Pérez, to go with her new self. Yet whether she has been altogether transformed is a question that Audiard coyly teases throughout the rest of the movie, which grows exponentially busier and self-consciously melodramatic. One complicating factor is Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, who also sings and dances), whom Emilia has left but now ingratiates herself with in order to see their kids. Audiard also tosses a pair of plot-thickening love interests: Adriana Paz as Epifanía and Edgar Ramírez as Gustavo.
The movie’s racing tempo, rapidly detonating bombshells and strategic ellipses — you know more about Emilia’s love for her children than, say, how many people she murdered as a cartel boss — gives the story a destabilizing momentum and mounting suspense. That becomes even truer when, after a pause (“four years later”), the focus shifts from Rita to Emilia, who seems to have stepped out of a telenovela by way of Pedro Almodóvar and Douglas Sirk. Resettled in Mexico with seemingly infinite resources, Emilia transforms yet again, this time into a benevolent patron for victims of cartel violence, a development that introduces a jolt of horrific reality, which this movie handles like another eccentric plot turn.
That’s more than too bad, especially because Saldaña and Gascón are so appealing and sincere. They deserve better, particularly Gascón, a trans actress who gives Emilia grande-dame hauteur but also lucid expressivity that allows you to see the conflicting emotions pulsing under her skin. Audiard has created an elaborate frame for Emilia, whose desire to become her true self is moving. Hers is at once a personal truth and a new kind of heroic quest, one that the offscreen world has grotesquely politicized. Audiard has created Emilia to startle and divert, but it’s Gascón’s performance that centers and grounds the story, and it’s the actress who finally gives the movie real stakes. She is its heart and soul both.
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