Movie Review: Emilia Pérez
Watching Emilia Pérez felt like I was watching a movie made by five different directors, all of whom wanted to make something different. It’s part gritty crime drama, part musical, part soap opera, part love story, part social message movie. The result is an audacious yet messy film.
Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is an underappreciated lawyer who just won a big case despite it being against her moral conscience. Struggling to stay passionate about her job, she is hired by cartel leader Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascón) to help them secretly find a doctor to perform gender reassignment surgery so they can stop suffering from body dysmorphia and be able to start a fresh life. Rita successfully fakes Manitas’ death and gets his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and his kids away safely to Switzerland.
Years later, Manitas, now known as Emilia Pérez, tracks down Rita and informs her she wants Jessi and the kids to move back with her to Mexico and live with her under the assumption that she is a distant cousin of Manitas. Once moved in, Emilia starts to act like the parent they never were towards Jessi’s children and becomes jealous when Jessi starts seeing another man. This is all happening while Rita and Email start a non-profit to identify bodies of cartel victims.
A lot is going on in Emilia Pérez. Writer/director Jacques Audiard is trying something new and it’s a commendable effort, but one that ultimately does not work. Nothing feels fully realized. The musical element is inconsistent, not knowing if it wanted to be more operatic where the actors use singing for talking, or if it wants to be more like a classical musical that features full song and dance numbers. The gritty crime drama vanishes relatively quickly and the soap opera and love story, while working the best overall, felt rushed and underdeveloped, which ultimately leads to a dud of an ending.
With Audiard trying to work within so many different genres, his script suffers from a lack of character development. His characters are thin, and the stories lack emotion and anything interesting. Jessi is barely a character. There is zero depth to her, and it doesn’t help that Gomez is wildly miscast in the role and fails to bring anything additional to the character. For being the titular character, Emilia isn’t given as much as she should be given despite being a complicated figure. I wish there was more of her and her struggles not revealing her identity to her children, the jealousy and anger she feels towards Jessi and her new lover, and the work of the non-profit and the internal battle of being a former cartel leader and now reconciling with what he has done. Rita is the most compelling character and a lot of that has to do with the performance given by Saldaña, who is simply fantastic. Her character feels lived and raw and she is also given the only memorable musical number, “El Mal”, which is a true stopper thanks to Saldaña’s ferocity and physicality.
Audiard took a big swing with Emilia Pérez and unfortunately, he missed. There are a lot of interesting ideas and bold choices and a sensational performance by Zoe Saldaña, but Audiard tries to juggle too many genres, characters, and stories and none of them get the proper treatment they deserve.
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