For better and more often worse, 2024 has become the year of the off-key movie musical. There have been remakes and sequels of sorts, like the oddly mundane Mean Girls and the intentionally insulting Joker: Folie à Deux. There are also original takes such as the silly yet somber upcoming film The End about the destruction of the world as we know it and the somehow more disastrous The Deb. However, none are or will ever be like Emilia Pérez. The latest from veteran director Jacques Audiard, who most recently made the slight though still far more successful Paris, 13th District, it's a film that gestures toward more complicated ideas around identity, violence and legacy only to do a grave disservice to all of them. The film is a lackluster musical whose blunt yet superficial songs undercut things still further — ensuring it's never able to do justice to its subject.
This all begins with Rita, played with real verve by a faultless Zoe Saldaña, a corporate lawyer tasked with defending the absolute worst of the worst people in an unnamed Mexican city. Her complicity in this cruel, corrupt system and how it troubles her conscience is introduced via a dance number that is actually one of the more dynamic parts of the film. Unfortunately, this initial promise only makes all the lesser ones that follow feel that much more forgettable by comparison. When Rita caps off this number by yelling "What bullshit!" at the story she tells herself about this system, it could just as easily serve as a warning about the woefully regressive film to come. Alas, this doesn't stop it from diving headfirst into nonsense.
When Rita is approached by cartel leader Juan "Manitas" Del Monte with an offer to help with a mysterious mission, she is more than a little wary of saying yes. However, this is all put aside when the notorious criminal shares that she has begun hormone replacement therapy and is seeking to become the titular Emilia Pérez through secret gender-affirming surgery. Played in this both pre and post-surgery time by transgender telenovela star Karla Sofía Gascón, who brings grace to a film desperately lacking in it, far too many scenes rely on rather essentializing and obsessive fixating on her body, even nearly going so far as to have Rita almost gawk at her.
Still, the lawyer agrees, helping connect Emilia with a willing surgeon, who gets a whole truly mind-numbing number involving everyone singing "Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!," like they're recording an ad for a fast food restaurant and reading off the menu options. Once this surgery is successful, Emilia fakes her death and goes into hiding, only to approach Rita years later so she can reconnect with the family she left behind. Led by a struggling Selena Gomez as her wife, Jessi, it all plays like a forced dramedy with no depth to any of it. A song sung by a child about her smell is so comical it nearly falls apart. This is even before Emilia starts a charity as a way of making amends for the violence she helped to oversee before her surgery, which is where things go from misjudged to borderline insulting.
Specifically, the central core of the film's muddled reflections on identity ends up relying far too simply on the physical at the expense of the emotional and the spiritual. It seems to want us to take it seriously, but keeps coming at the ideas it throws out from all the wrong angles. The tying of the body to the soul already feels undercooked despite it seemingly being what the film is building itself around only, for it to then completely cross over into being contrived and overly neat. The film seems to treat Emilia getting gender-affirming surgery as reason to absolve her of all the past harms she's wrought, asking viewers to accept her as a good, even saint-like person. It's so essentializing that it feels like a slap in the face. The movie certainly tries to tackle a lot, and the cast do the best they can to handle the weight foisted upon their shoulders, but it proves far too much to ask of them.
The longer it dances along, the more it starts to feel like Emilia Pérez is merely interested in using its subjects as a backdrop without ever taking us deeper into it. There are songs and some shootouts for good measure, though little of it offers any real substance. It's a film so profoundly perfunctory that, no matter how many times it breaks into so-so singing, it all strikes a hollow tune you can't fully shake. When the whole affair draws to a halting close, the only insight it tepidly reveals to us is how fundamentally Audiard's grasps at wisdom are not even skin-deep.
Emilia Pérez
