Just shy of 10 years after winning an ill-deserved Palme d’Or for Dheepan (2015) — a leering intrusion into the lives of a makeshift Sri Lankan family, shunted mercilessly from one violent situation to the next — French director Jacques Audiard returned to the Croisette with his latest exercise in cultural tourism. The Mexico-set Emilia Pérez, which walked away with the fest’s Jury Prize and a Best Actress award for its ensemble cast, has been billed as a telenovela-gangster-musical about a cartel boss who fakes her own death in order to transition to womanhood. If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is, and Audiard’s latest wastes no time in showing you the full extent to which a film can renege on its logline. Emilia Pérez isn’t just the most perniciously racist and transphobic film to rule the festival circuit in as many years as this writer has been alive (though that alone should have been enough to nip its reign of terror in the bud); it’s also an opera with no sense of musicality, a melodrama with no investment in human emotion, a thriller with no pulse, and a redemption story with no redeeming qualities.
If that seems like an extreme statement, allow a picture to be painted. A light-up mariachi band fades into a cityscape drone shot (the first of so, so many) as an auto-tuned overture guides us toward Rita Mora (Zoe Saldaña), a defense attorney with mixed feelings about the role she is playing in her country’s network of corruption. She proves easily bought, however, when the infamous “Manitas del Monte” — soon to be Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) — offers her a small fortune to orchestrate her rebirth and tuck Mrs. del Monte (Selena Gomez) and their children conveniently away (the details of Rita’s task are not known to her when she agrees, only the numerical figure). The buildup to Emilia’s transition is excruciating; Gascón (a Spanish actress who feels “Mexican by adoption”) performs in cartoonish brownface as Manitas, and in spite of having already started hormone treatment, the character is constantly misgendered even by those ostensibly working in her best interest. Tellingly, the appropriate pronouns are only implemented in the screenplay once she undergoes SRS, and Audiard stages a ghoulish musical number in a Thai plastic surgery facility that all-too-perfectly encapsulates the cisgendered obsession with biological modes of transition.
It’s after a four-year time jump, however, that Audiard reveals his full hand; Rita and Emilia are reunited in a posh London restaurant, and Rita is pulled back into Emilia’s orbit when she facilitates the return of her children to Mexico, disgruntled mother in tow. Upon their return, the two women are confronted with the impacts of their former lives on the country they used to call home. A woman wandering the streets handing out missing posters of her dead son — implied to have been murdered by Pérez’s cronies almost a decade prior — inspires Emilia to recover his remains and bring this bereaved mother closure. As Emilia and Rita drift between the former’s obscenely lavish villa overlooking Mexico City and the offices of the NGO they’ve founded together, which expands this process of excavation to a national level, Gomez’s clueless and restless Jessi ditches the children to party with a former squeeze. A slapdash love interest (the underused Adriana Paz) enters Emilia’s life for seemingly no reason other than lesbian optics, and shortly thereafter Audiard pits all of these women against each other in a rush to get to its dutifully violent conclusion.
Aside from the dramatic frailty of its screenplay’s unmitigated wreck of moral conflicts and compromises, Emilia Pérez’s attempts to paint a larger picture of a Mexico in crisis are dubious to say the least. Aforementioned drone shots notwithstanding, it was primarily shot on a soundstage in Paris, per the director’s wishes, and this lends itself to the film’s lack of texture and sense of place. The camera glides over its subjects with an air of condescension and self-righteousness, and these sentiments are matched by the pitiful soundtrack, which clamorously cycles through vague platitudes and shameless stereotypes — during the big “national healing” number, a repentant man asks for his skin to be cleansed of tattoos, and for someone to teach him that one and two make three). Emilia Pérez is a sour, smirking film that touts numerous borrowed labels, and hides behind the PR-friendly faces of actresses who should have known better, in a desperate bid to make its quintessential Gallicisms easier to swallow.
Published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 4.
