Emilia Pérez

Emilia Pérez

Cannes film festival

VERDICT: Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña show off their song-and-dance skills in Jacques Audiard's audacious Mexican musical thriller, a lusty celebration of multicultural queerness and gender-bending redemption.

Léalo en español

Who could have predicted Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic ego-fest Megalopolis would turn out to be only the second most audaciously bizarre entry in this year’s Cannes competition? Celebrated French writer-director Jacques Audiard has an eclectic track record spanning rom-coms to Oscar-nominated prison drama A Prophet (2009). But Emilia Pérez is by some distance his most original and ambitious feature yet, an emotionally supercharged Spanish-language musical thriller about a Mexican transgender woman seeking atonement for her past crimes as a ruthlessly violent crime cartel boss. Naturally she navigates this feel-good journey using the most obvious vehicle available: high-energy song-and-dance numbers. Imagine a cross between Scarface (1983) and Mrs Doubtfire (1993), directed by Pedro Almodovar, with a starry international cast headed by Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, and you get some idea of this gloriously unhinged Cannes competition contender.

In marked difference to Megalopolis, however, Emilia Pérez also happens to be hugely entertaining, impeccably crafted, and compassionately invested in its kaleidoscopic tapestry of characters. Even if the telenovela-sized plot feels a little too brash and boisterous for a festival dominated by tastefully restrained art-house cinema, it is impossible to fault Audiard’s technical finesse and sheer audacity, still exploring bold new frontiers at the age of 72. Following his English-language debut with The Sisters Brothers (2018), this is his first feature in Spanish, his first musical, and easily his wildest rodeo ride to date. The director already won the Palme d’Or once before, for Dheepan (2015). He may yet score the big Cannes prize again with this lusty celebration of multicultural queerness and gender-bending redemption.

Audiard gets value for money from his bilingual cast members, chiefly Saldaña, who has Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage, and Mexican-American Gomez, both switching between Spanish and English throughout. Saldaña anchors the film as Rita, a sharp-witted Mexico City lawyer who is sick of using her poorly rewarded rhetorical skills to help get murderous criminals off the hook. After a terrifying abduction in the street, she faces a life-changing offer she can’t refuse, a massive paycheck for helping a notoriously brutal cartel leader Manitos (Spanish trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón) change his identity. The twist is, Manitos wants full gender reassignment surgery, not merely to escape the law but to become the woman that he, or she, has always been inside.

Four years later, Rita is living her best life in London, far away from the murky morality of the Mexican underworld. Or so she believes. Manitas has staged his own death in order to become his/her new self, Emilia Pérez (Gascón again). But she suddenly resurfaces to demand Rita’s help with another life-changing scheme. Missing the family she left behind, she now wants to return to Mexico posing as a long-lost aunt, and set up home again with her ex-wife Jessi (Gomez) and their two young children.

Despite Jessi’s initial resistance, the family are eventually reunited in a grand Mexico City mansion. Emilia then enlists Rita for her next ambitious project, an NGO offering support to the thousands of Mexicans still seeking grim remains of loved ones abducted and murdered by the drug cartels. Emilia is the perfect figurehead for this organisation since she knows where the bodies are buried, metaphorically and literally. The group becomes a huge success, while both Emilia and Jessi find love in separate relationships. But the family’s history of violence inevitably comes back to claim karmic payback in a bloody, fiery, explosive finale.

Audiard’s initial spark of inspiration for Emilia Pérez was a chapter in Écoute, a 2018 novel by French author and broadcaster Boris Razon, though the director has greatly expanded and amended his source material. He first considered staging the project as a live opera, sounding out potential collaborators including Damon Albarn of Blur/Gorillaz fame. But the story gradually took on a cinematic form, with Audiard settling on musician-arranger Clément Ducol and his more famous partner, avant-pop singer and actress Camille Dalmais, as his main score collaborators.

Incorporating spoken-word chants, chanson-style power ballads and booming hip-hop numbers, the music is consistently excellent, full of dextrous verbal volleys that inevitably invoke Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Dalmais and Ducol include some delightfully inventive sonic touches too, like using the percussive click-clack of shotguns being assembled as an instrument. The songs are also superbly staged in different settings, from karaoke bars to gender reassigment clinics to multi-location split-screen duets, and even a massed march featuring a devotional hymn to a secular saint. With pleasing echoes of the great Jacques Demy, Audiard often switches seamlessly between spoken and sung dialogue, naturalistic performance and stylised choreography.

Emilia Pérez keeps the narrative and stylistic curveballs coming, barely hitting a wrong note or a slow patch in its two-hours-plus runtime. Crucially, cast and crew rightly resist the temptation to play this lurid material as campy melodrama, instead investing its torrid passions and serious real-world themes with straight-faced conviction. Saldaña is a major asset here, transforming an underwritten lead character into an all-singing, all-dancing, high-voltage star performance. Gomez is also on terrific form as a sassy, acid-tongued mobster’s moll while Gascón brings impressive versatility and fierce drag-king energy to her dual roles. The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

Director, screenwriter: Jacques Audiard
Cast: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Édgar Ramírez, Adriana Paz
Cinematography Paul Guilhaume
Editing: Juliette Welfling
Music: Clément Ducol, Camille
Producers: Jacques Audiard, Pascal Caucheteux, Valérie Schermann, Anthony Vaccarello
Production companies: Why Not Productions (France), Page 114 (France), Pimienta Films (Mexico), France 2 Cinéma (France), Saint Laurent Productions (France)
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In Spanish, English
130 minutes