"Emilia Pérez" is not a Mexican film. That much is clear. It's not really about Mexico but rather procures the context of the embattled country as a backdrop for its musical fantasia, interested in a character trying to cross the border between viciousness and tenderness. Watching "Emilia Pérez" is akin to tasting a combination of substances that haven't previously been put together, at first being taken aback by the bizarre taste but still going in for another sip. It's a deliriously rhapsodic concoction, at times preposterous in what the lyrics of its Spanish-language songs aim to convey, and others quite affecting.
This narco-opera is not Mexican, not only because its writer-director Jacques Audiard is French, but also because it was almost entirely shot on Parisian soundstages where the streets of Mexico City were recreated for scenes with an international cast. Even its source material—a chapter in Boris Razon‘s 2018 novel Écoute— is foreign. The result from all these layers that remove it from Mexico is a hyper-curated, phantasmagorical melodrama from the mind of an artist with no direct ties to the land in which he's chosen to set his fiction. That built-in detachment is perhaps what allows "Emilia Pérez" to be so messily unbound.
And yet, there are enough aspects that Audiard allows into his emotionally heightened frames that, at the very least, imply a desire for a quasi-authentic portrayal—as much as his outsider gaze and artistic ambitions can allow. A TV screen shows young women protesting against femicides in the streets of Mexico City. The sensationalist newspapers typical of Mexican newsstands—their front pages bearing gruesome photos of vicious acts—and the loudspeaker from collecting scrap metal enrich the milieu of this replica. There's a constant, fascinating friction between the movie's inherent, often overwhelming artificiality and Audiard's sincere attempt at unfurling something truthful about the pursuit of redemption and self-preservation.
The woman that lends the film its title exists in the body of Karla Sofía Gascón, a Spanish trans actress who found success in Mexican films and soap operas long before transitioning. Most notably, Gascón played the male antagonist in one of Mexico's biggest homegrown box-office hits, 2013's "Nosotros los Nobles" ("We Are the Nobles"). Now, Gascón impressively flexes her acting range and her singing voice in a double role, first as Manitas Del Monte, a feared drug lord with gender dysphoria, and later as Emilia Pérez, a philanthropist whose nonprofit helps families search for their disappeared loved ones.
This new, post-transition facet manifests her desire for atonement as the person responsible for plenty of those losses. Within the same lifetime, the victimizer desperately seeks to become the paladin, but her long-standing sins didn't die when she buried that other version of herself. Her at-all-costs wish to evade accountability poisons her freedom. A paradox emerges from how Emilia moves through the world as her true self because she will savagely wield her power to secure the kindness and unconditional affection she so deeply craves. Ruthlessness, evidently, isn't an exclusively male quality.
To help with the logistical aspects of her transition, Manitas hires Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer fed up with defending men she knows are guilty of crimes against women. However, her consciousness doesn't preclude her from succumbing to the temptation of a financially lavish life on the other side of her illicit assignment. The job also entails settling Manita's wife Jessi (an unabashedly raw Selena Gomez) and her two children in Switzerland. The musical numbers add up quickly and primarily in Saldaña's voice and choreographed movements in sequences that often involve an ensemble around her as if the verbose tracks were swallowing the world around them into their alluringly baffling whirlwind.
As contrived as some of the lines in these tracks are, Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume partially smooth out their implementation by finding a middle ground between precision and erratic kinetic energy in the numbers, at times aiming for symmetry, at others surrendering to chaos. At their most intimate, these renditions are entrancing.
There's a heart-wrenching earnestness to Manita's delicate operatic singing in front of Rita before undergoing multiple surgeries, yearning for a soft-heartedness that his existence in a hyper-masculine environment denied him. While Saldaña is the consistent standout in an expectations-defying performance, she completely disregards the format's deliberate unnaturalness. Her turn is grounded on facial expressions that perpetually bely guilt over her involvement and the macro implications of what Rita knows about Emilia's past.
Then there's the question of language in "Emilia Pérez," where none of its three main actors speak with a Mexican accent. Though Audiard himself doesn't speak Spanish, I must admit my surprise at the use of colloquial language thanks to whoever translated the text; that's more than most American productions set anywhere in Latin America can say (take note "Sicario"). Furthermore, Audiard doesn't try to pass Saldaña's nor Gomez's characters as women born and raised in Mexico. Through dialogue, Rita reveals she grew up in the Dominican Republic, and Jessi points to a likely Mexican-American background when she invokes her sister in the States. The casting then becomes another patch in this glamorous pastiche.
It's then fitting that the only Mexican performer in the main ensemble, Adriana Paz, plays an understated character and the only one without blood on her hands: Epifania, Emilia's new love interest searching for a missing family member. I didn't go into "Emilia Pérez" seeking the type of introspective, searing humanism that Mexican filmmakers like Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero delivered with "Identifying Features" and now "Sujo." Realistic dramas are concerned not with the violence but with how its fallout creates perpetual victims, which come from their first-hand understanding of the Mexican imaginary. Those are the voices worth supporting for such narrative work.
Mexican audiences have grown accustomed to American perspectives exploiting narco-related afflictions for narratives unconcerned with addressing its root causes. Questioning the intentions of those productions will always be valid. But to decry Audiard for partaking in the common filmmaking practice of telling stories away from what's immediately familiar to him would seem an overly simplistic assessment.
Still, it's true that the reach of "Emilia Pérez," given the Hollywood names attached and that it has Netflix as its distributor, is incomparable to what independent, arthouse Mexican productions can hope for. More people will watch Audiard's vision of a Mexico in turmoil than those of Mexicans, and therein lies a larger concern about which art is championed and which isn't. For all its prickly aesthetic and thematic components, there's an enticing lusciousness to "Emilia Pérez" derived from that over-the-top saturation of hammered-in ideas in combination with dazzling and dizzying imagery. Like synthetic flavoring extracts, there's no real fruit in them, but the feelings they provoke, positive and negative alike, are true.
