Film review

Jacques Audiard (2024)

The French director Jacques Audiard made his well-deserved reputation with films set in his native country.  In more recent years he has developed a strong interest in exploring immigrant and refugee experience in France – in A Prophet (2009), in Dheepan (2015) and, less seriously, in Paris, 13^th District (2021).  But The Sisters Brothers (2018), a jocose revisionist Western with mostly American actors, was a new departure for Audiard.  Now comes Emilia Pérez, set predominantly in Mexico and with a very international cast:  the main roles are played by a Spaniard, two Americans, a Mexican, a Venezuelan and an Israeli.  The film is also a genre mash-up, vindicating IMDb’s policy of covering all bases when it comes to movie categorisation:  it labels Emilia Pérez a Comedy-Crime-Musical-Thriller, which is accurate enough.  Audiard is, of course, free to go wherever in the world he chooses – and Emilia Pérez, thanks to the combination of an extravagantly off-the-wall story and the complete conviction with which this is told and performed, is very entertaining (much more so than the curdled, self-satisfied The Sisters Brothers).  But this new film is problematic as well as bizarre.  Although it proudly proclaims its right-on credentials, cultural stereotyping comes in handy, too.  In other words:  if this is Mexico, we must be talking systemic corruption and drug cartels.

Rita Mora Castro (Zoë Saldaña) is a lawyer in Mexico City.  A high-profile media figure is on trial for killing his wife and Rita writes the defence case, arguing suicide.  In doing so, she’s obeying a senior though less able male colleague (Eduardo Aladro) and disregarding her own conscience:  she’s sure the defendant is guilty of murder.  The defence case succeeds and the big shot is acquitted.  Rita then receives an anonymous phone call, inviting her to a secret meeting to discuss a lucrative proposition.  Dismayed by the case she has just ‘won’, Rita, in a spirit of what-the-hell, accepts the invitation.  Arriving at the meeting place, she’s grabbed from behind, hooded and driven away.  The hood is removed for her interview with her prospective client, cartel boss Juan ‘Manitas’ Del Monte.  Manitas, who has wanted to be a woman since childhood, is now ready for what used to be called a sex-change operation.  Rita accepts the job of arranging both the operation and its complex consequences.  The surgery takes place in Tel Aviv.  Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), who knows nothing of her husband’s identity crisis, is relocated to Switzerland with the couple’s two children, for their safety.  A fake death is staged for Manitas and Jessi told that her husband is no more.  Rita receives handsome remuneration for her efforts, courtesy of her client’s bank account, which is also in Switzerland.  Manitas begins a new life as a woman called Emilia Pérez.

Why is it Rita whom Manitas approaches?  If, as he tells Rita, he has already been taking gender reassignment drugs for a couple of years, how come Manitas’s face is still as swarthily hirsute as you’d expect the face of a Mexican cartel kingpin to be?  Watching Emilia Pérez, you soon realise that it doesn’t pay to ask questions like these because Jacques Audiard, who also wrote the film, doesn’t know or care about the answers.  What matters is that the prologue has shown that Rita is a professionally capable, sensitive woman who, in order to succeed in a man’s world, must suppress her better nature – and that it’s now clear that Manitas has an analogous predicament.  What also matters is that Manitas/Emilia is played by Karla Sofía Gascón, who is a trans woman.  The narrative jumps forward by four years:  in a London restaurant, Rita finds herself sitting next to Emilia, who is missing her children desperately.  Rita takes on a new assignment – to bring Jessi and the kids back to Mexico City, to live in Emilia’s grand house.  Emilia is introduced to Jessi as Manitas’s distant cousin – and as someone with the time and resources to help the widow raise her children.  Rita meanwhile becomes Emilia’s right-hand woman in a new venture, a non-profit organisation to help find ‘disappeared’ cartel victims.

If you think about it, the scenario that develops in Emilia Pérez is surprising in a film purporting to celebrate a journey from gender dysphoria to gender affirmation.  (Granted you’re maybe meant not to think about it and to go along with the movie as another irresistible ‘mad’ ride, like Anora.)  It sounds PC that a male cartel boss becomes a trans woman – that is, someone who is, by right-on definition, a bad person becomes someone who’s, by the same definition, a good person.  But how does this work if the person concerned was always essentially a woman?  In their first interview Manitas tells Rita that the imperatives of macho cartel culture made it impossible to reveal her authentic self – although that begs the question of why, in view of her real identity, Manitas had to become part of cartel culture in the first place.  (The film gives Manitas next to no backstory.)  This is one question to which Audiard may subsequently supply an answer – but it only prompts other questions about how fully he embraces the trans agenda.

There’s an interesting debate in Tel Aviv between Rita and Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), the doctor who will perform Manitas’s surgery.  Wasserman asks if Rita is sure that Manitas is essentially a ‘she’:  if not, ‘he’ will always be a ‘he’ – Wasserman says that he can’t change ‘souls’.  Rita robustly disagrees:  she takes the striking view that the realisation of true identity helps to change society for the better, changing ‘souls’ into the bargain.  Rita has already emerged as the film’s intelligent moral conscience so you can expect her ambitious argument to prevail – and I guess it does, though none too clearly.  Shortly after the exchange between Rita and Wasserman, Manitas reaffirms that she always knew she was destined to be a woman:  the remark is somewhat ambiguous but take away the words ‘destined to be’ and the sense is certainly different.  The narrative tells us hardly anything about what happened in the four years between Manitas’s operation and Emilia’s reunion with Rita.  But it’s evident in what comes next that Emilia is able, as Manitas was not, to run an organisation rooted in compassion.  This seems to be less because she has realised her essential identity than because she can now live as a woman.  You start to question whether this film really is about gender affirmation – as distinct from moral transformation through male-to-female gender reassignment.  Audiard’s portrait of Mexican society appears to suggest that, if the surgery had been the other way round, Emilia/Manitas would have transmogrified into a violent criminal.

Emilia Pérez isn’t quite 100% philogynist.  Jessi agrees to return from Switzerland only in order to resume seeing Gustavo Brun (Édgar Ramírez), with whom she started an affair once Manitas stopped sleeping with her.  She’s happy to spend her time in Mexico City in clubs and with Gustavo, and to leave the job of mothering largely to Emilia, who’s more than happy to take it on.  (The film isn’t quite 100% misandrist either – this domestic set-up brings Mrs Doubtfire (1993) to mind.)   But all the stuff involving, and flowing from, Emilia’s NGO, confirms the message of Rita’s opening court case:  patriarchy is rotten, women are its victims and have to pick up the pieces.  Wearing her non-profit boss hat, Emilia interviews Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz), who arrives at their meeting with a knife hidden in her bag.  She plans to murder Emilia for finding the long-lost husband who violently abused Epifanía.  When Emilia explains that he’s been found dead, Epifanía changes her mind in a big way:  she and Emilia instantly become romantic partners (which at least clarifies Emilia’s sexual orientation).  Emilia’s making moral amends through her NGO – ‘La Lucetita’ (‘ray of light’) – isn’t presented satirically.  As a result, it’s remarkably tasteless.  Audiard seems here to be exploiting the idea that, in a musical, anything goes and you needn’t take it too seriously – at the same time, he expects the audience to applaud Emilia’s new-found humanitarianism.  And Rita shares her creator’s slipperiness.  Although conscience-stricken at the start, she seems not to struggle much with getting paid a fortune by someone who made theirs in organised crime.

I was rather dreading seeing the film after reading beforehand that it was based on Audiard’s ‘opera libretto’.  Although that’s what he originally had in mind in writing it, Emilia Pérez hasn’t been produced on stage (not yet anyway).  My fears this would be a sung-through musical were quickly allayed.  The French singer Camille is credited with the lyrics for the film’s numbers – some are choreographed, by Damien Jalet – but  these typically come across as a passage of dialogue set to a repeated musical phrase.  The phrases, devised by Clément Ducol (Camille’s long-time musical collaborator and life partner), supply a rhythm to accompany the words rather than a melody.  The exceptions – and, for me, the standout numbers – are a duet performed by Jessi and Gustavo as karaoke in a club, and the rousing final anthem, with bereaved Epifanía leading crowds through the streets of Mexico City, celebrating the life and liberating example of the film’s title character.

The super-melodramatic last act of Emilia Pérez has begun with Jessi announcing she’s going to marry Gustavo and move with him and her children to a new home.  Emilia can’t conceal her upset and anger; disturbed by this aggressive reaction, Jessi makes off with the children.  She and Gustavo then kidnap Emilia.  Held hostage, Emilia reveals her former identity to Jessi, recalling intimate details of how they first met and their wedding day.  Strange to say, the revelation prompts Jessi to discover at the eleventh hour her own caring female essence.  Rita, issued with a ransom demand, turns up to discuss terms but a shootout ensues (I didn’t get with whom) and Gustavo drives off – with Jessi in the passenger seat and Emilia in the car boot.  Jessi is suddenly impelled – out of a sense of female solidarity with her ex-husband? – to pull a gun on Gustavo.  There’s a brief struggle and the car crashes off the road, bursting into flames.  All three of its occupants are killed.  Audiard wraps things up quite neatly.  At one point, Rita has lamented that ‘my personal life is a desert, my professional life is a sewer’.  She’s now in a position to solve at least the first problem:  she tells Emilia and Jessi’s orphaned children she will be their guardian.

The three prizes won by Emilia Pérez at this year’s Cannes Festival included Best Actress, awarded jointly to four members of the cast.  It wasn’t the first time a multiple award had been made in this category (the most recent previous example was in 2006, when six women in Almodóvar’s Volver received the prize).  It was the first time, however, that a trans woman had been named Best Actress at Cannes – and it’s long odds on that Karla Sofía Gascón will break more new ground in the coming annual awards season and become, in particular, the first trans performer to be nominated for an Oscar[1].  Born in Spain in 1972, Gascón has had quite a long career in Spanish TV movies and Mexican telenovelas, and was credited until 2018 as Juan Carlos Gascón.  She’s a magnetic, gravid presence in Emilia Pérez, her acting noticeably less supple than that of the co-recipients of the Cannes prize (Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Zoë Saldaña).  Gascón seems somehow to impose emotions on a scene rather than convincingly feel them – she certainly switches deliberately from one emotion to another.  The performance rings a non-PC bell or two:  when Gascón teeters away from the camera wearing a tight skirt and high heels, Dick Emery’s ooh-you-are-awful Mandy comes shamefully to mind; when Emilia, appalled to hear of Jessi’s intention to marry Gustavo, suddenly produces angry chest notes, you can’t help thinking of Steve Nallon’s alarming key changes as the voice of Spitting Image‘s Margaret Thatcher puppet.  Karla Sofía Gascón and what she represents are wholly indispensable to Emilia Pérez.  Any more awards that come her way will be emblematic, too.

7 November 2024

[1]  I’m not counting trans man Elliot Page, who was nominated as Best Actress for Juno (2007) as Ellen Page, before gender reassignment treatment.