Film review

  • Emilia Pérez

    Old YorkerFilm 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, 13th 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.

  • Jude

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Winterbottom (1996)

    BBC4’s Thomas Hardy season got off to a fine start with A Haunted Man, a 1978 drama-documentary focusing on the breakdown of Hardy’s first marriage to Emma Gifford and the remorseful love poems that he wrote after her death.  Cyril Luckham and Billie Whitelaw appeared as Hardy and Emma in short dramatic reconstructions; their readings of poems and diary extracts were exceptional – really wonderful – and Caroline Blakiston supplied a well-judged narrative voiceover.  The next evening’s line-up featured Jude, preceded by one of BBC4’s short ‘X Remembers … Y’ pieces.  I’d not previously seen Michael Winterbottom’s version of Jude the Obscure and there’s no denying that ‘Christopher Eccleston Remembers … Jude’ coloured my reactions to the film.  I’ll try not to let that dominate what I write next though I’m sure Eccleston’s view of Hardy’s novel and its protagonist got in the way of his performance.

    A typical edition of Jude the Obscure runs to several hundred pages; this screen adaptation, scripted by Hossein Amini, is barely more than two hours long.  Thomas Vinterberg’s similarly compact remake of Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) is a good film but I recall watching it grateful that I could relate Vinterberg’s streamlined version to the larger context of the novel, which I know fairly well.  In contrast, I’ve never returned to Jude the Obscure since struggling through it as a teenager.  Even with a limited recollection of the book, though, Winterbottom’s film feels exceedingly abbreviated – feels like ‘Scenes from Jude the Obscure’.  The film omits a lot, and not only peripheral elements.  For example, Hardy’s Jude Fawley is a religious believer in his youth while his cousin, Sue Bridehead, with whom he falls in love (as she does with him), is agnostic – she has no time for the Christian church or its institutions.  By the closing stages of the story, these positions, thanks to a series of traumatic events in the pair’s lives, are effectively reversed but Winterbottom hardly bothers to show Jude moving away from Christianity.  The film ends with what may be his and Sue’s parting company for the last time but which isn’t the final parting that Jude’s death in the novel puts beyond doubt.

    When Jude Fawley is still a young boy (James Daley), the village schoolteacher, Mr Phillotson (Liam Cunningham), points out on the far horizon the spires of a town called Christminster:  if you want to be anything in life, Phillotson tells Jude, this place of learning is where you need to get to.  It’s where Phillotson, about to leave the village, is now heading.  (In ‘Remembering …’ Christopher Eccleston said that ‘we all know’ Christminster is Cambridge:  most people have taken it to be Oxford.)  The young man Jude (Eccleston) has taught himself Latin and Greek, and is determined to be a scholar.  His plans are derailed by a romance with a local girl, Arabella Donn (Rachel Griffiths); when she tells him she’s pregnant, Jude feels obliged to marry her and gets work as a stonemason.  Arabella isn’t pregnant and, a few months later, leaves her husband.  Jude heads for Christminster, at first earning his living there as a stonemason but hoping to gain admission to the university.  He also meets up with Sue Bridehead (Kate Winslet) and renews acquaintance with Phillotson, now a primary school teacher in Christminster.  At Jude’s urging, Phillotson takes on Sue as an assistant and falls for her, despite the large age difference between them.  Although she loves Jude, Sue, when she learns about Arabella, reluctantly accepts Phillotson’s proposal and they marry.  It’s poignantly apt that, at the wedding service, Jude gives Sue away.

    The hero’s frustrated scholarship, crucial to the novel, is central to Jude too but the compressed narrative makes it hard for Winterbottom to convey Jude’s love of learning as well as his academic ambition.  Every so often, Eccleston’s Jude, at his books, reads a bit of Latin or Greek aloud but you’re not sure why:  in retrospect, these bits seem like rehearsal for one of the film’s big sequences, when Jude recites the Nicene Creed in a busy pub.  In his cups, he tells his fellow stone workers that he knows the creed in Latin; a Christminster undergraduate, also drunk, overhears and goads Jude into proving it.  As the derisive student, David Tennant, in his first feature film role, is on screen for just a few seconds, long enough for you to see why he got more work.  The scene goes wrong, though.  As soon as he leaps onto a table and starts the recitation, Eccleston drops Jude’s inebriation in favour of righteous anger.  There are different social groups in the pub – the posh undergraduates, various working men.  When Jude abruptly reverts to English to jeer at the company – they’ve no idea, he announces, whether or not he’s got the Latin right – no one replies, even to tell him to shut up.  Once he eventually does so, the pub’s other customers just resume drinking.  In one sense, you can understand their lack of reaction – everyone must be relieved when Jude’s performance is over.  But is vague anti-climax what Winterbottom intended?

    Knowledge of the novel will also ensure a better understanding than a viewer gets from the film alone of Jude and Sue’s determination, after her marriage to Phillotson fails, to live together but not wed.  It seems they’re not legally prevented from marrying, even though Jude, unlike Hardy’s novel, blurs the terms on which Phillotson agrees to let Sue go off with Jude.  (It is clear in the film that Jude and Arabella divorce.)  There’s a brief scene in which Sue volubly disparages the Church and marriage but it’s hardly enough to explain why, later in the story, she and Jude don’t at least pretend to be husband and wife.  By this stage, they have three young children to care for but face repeated difficulties because they’re upfront about their unconventional partnership.  Jude, working on a masonry assignment, is fired by a regretful church official (Paul Copley) because parishioners have complained that the mason and his woman are living in sin.  (Jude seems astonished to get the push – a reaction that’s rather astonishing in itself.)  Homeless and nearly penniless, the family then gets a roof over their heads but only for one night – this again because Jude and Sue aren’t Mr and Mrs.

    The eldest of the three children is Juey (Ross Colvin Turnbull), the son of Jude and Arabella, who wasn’t expecting when she tricked Jude into marriage but was by the time she deserted him and emigrated to Australia.  She made a bigamous marriage there.  Arabella returns to England temporarily to ask for a divorce; soon afterwards, Juey arrives to live with his biological father.  Once Sue overcomes her aversion to having sex, she and Jude have two children of their own.  When Juey asks why they can’t stay more than one night in their new lodgings, Sue rashly replies that it’s because ‘there are too many of us’.  This greatly troubles the boy and Jude’s reassurances are in vain; next morning, Jude and Sue come back to the lodgings, buoyant because Jude has found employment, to discover a note from Juey.  All three children are dead, Juey having killed his half-siblings and hanged himself ‘Becos we were to menny’.   Winterbottom’s staging of this terrible discovery – a tragedy that triggers Sue’s guilt-ridden embrace of religion, separation from Jude and eventual return to Phillotson – is, like the pub scene, strangely indecisive.  When Jude picks up each of the dead children, you could understand if he performed the action either with great tenderness or, in an attempt to shut out the horror of what’s happened, in a seemingly businesslike way.  Christopher Eccleston suggests neither of those things.

    This half-heartedness isn’t at all typical, however, of Eccleston’s playing.  In his curtain-raiser slot, he railed against the British class system that thwarted the likes of Jude Fawley and which, according to Eccleston, continues to prevent working-class actors like him from realising their full potential – and is getting worse.  (Eccleston said that if he were starting out today he simply couldn’t be an actor.)  A strong but undifferentiated resentment dominates his portrait of Jude.  Whether things go wrong in his romantic life or he receives a rejection letter from the university at Christminster advising him to stick to his trade rather than try to use his brain, Eccleston is oppressed in the same way, passionately but fuzzily pissed off.  His ‘Remembering’ monologue sometimes verged on it’s-grim-up-North spoof (bringing to mind Jim Broadbent’s writer in the Victoria Wood sketch, a man who ‘bleed[s] for the North’ but lives in Chiswick).  Eccleston explained his fellow Lancastrian Winterbottom’s insistence on filming the rural scenes not in Dorset but in Yorkshire and Lancashire – because the film’s ‘psychological landscape … it’s hard and it’s tough and it’s rugged’.  One in the eye for softie southerner Thomas Hardy, though perhaps some consolation to him that, as Eccleston went on to acknowledge, they also did location filming in New Zealand.

    It must be said that DP Eduardo Serra’s cinematography is expressive whatever the landscape and Eccleston reasonably praised Adrian Johnston’s fluid music for the film.  What chiefly saves Jude, though, are the main performances other than the lead’s.  Kate Winslet, in an early cinema role, is amazingly vivid and sparky – so that Sue’s increasing melancholy, unlike Jude’s, has real impact.  (Eccleston’s best moments come when he lets down his political guard – lets himself react naturally to Winslet.)  The narrative condensation means that Rachel Griffiths’ Arabella keeps turning up like a bad penny in a nearly comical way but Griffiths is nuanced and makes it easier to sympathise with the character than you might expect.  Liam Cunningham is surprising casting:  he’s probably too young and good-looking to play a man whose twenty-plus-years younger wife finds him physically repellent.  (He’s fourteen years older than Kate Winslet and only three years older than Christopher Eccleston.)  Yet Cunningham’s face conveys Phillotson’s different disappointments – with how Christminster and how marriage turn out for him – in ways that you miss in the film’s Jude.  June Whitfield is also good, in the smaller but important role of Jude’s loving but alertly critical aunt, whose warnings to her nephew that the Fawleys ‘aren’t cut out for marriage’ prove powerfully ironic.

    31 October 2024

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