“Emilia Pérez” begins with a choral overture; a prologue characterized by electronic, almost Imogen Heap-style vocals. The screen is dark, and the camera quickly moves in on a band as they play along with the robotic tones, the brims of their hats bedazzled with the sort of lights you might also see adorning the cowboy hats of a bachelorette party in Nashville.
It all feels very glittery, very melodramatic, very camp – extravagant in the way the premise of “Emilia Pérez” deserves. Written and directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard (based on Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name), the musical film follows a Mexican cartel leader who enlists the help of a disillusioned lawyer to help fake her death and escape Mexico to finally live out her dream of transitioning to a woman.
Unfortunately, the film never lives up to the thrill or complexity that premise might imply. The hint of excitement the beginning promises fizzles out almost immediately.
“Emilia Pérez” has many of the same issues that plague many a modern movie musical, namely that Audiard doesn’t seem all that interested in anything – dance, song, expression – that makes a musical work. Damien Jalet’s choreography is limited by static filmmaking, and the music – the original songs were written by French singer Camille and the score composed by Clément Ducol – are muted at best. “Emilia Pérez” has no business being a musical, and yet it’s doubtful it would have been better if it weren’t. At least the musical numbers distract from the lack of specificity in the film’s characters and storytelling.
After the film’s short opening prologue, we meet our main protagonist – Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer reluctantly writing up a defense for a very rich man who almost certainly murdered his wife. She soon is employed (or more accurately kidnapped) by an infamous cartel leader who will become the titular Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón). After Rita helps Emilia fake her death and start over, leaving her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two children behind, the two part ways. When they reunite four years later, Emilia recruits Rita to help her reconcile with her old life and reunite with her family.
When Emilia first calls Rita to ask for her help, Rita weighs her options with a song called “Todo y Nada.” The number is emblematic of issues that will continue throughout the film. The camera follows Rita through the streets, a host of background actors dancing around her. But the camera never lets us take in the choreography, never moves with the dancers or lets their movements breathe. Instead, the camera stays on Rita as she makes her decision, the frame rarely showing the audience anything on a person that is below the waist. There is so much action in the background that the audience is rarely privy to, leading to a heightened sense of nothing but claustrophobia.
The songs themselves also leave much to be desired, not just in their composition, but in the way they’re performed. Every musical number feels like the actors have been directed to never sing above a whisper. Saldaña, who gives the best performance in the film, is able to break out of this quiet prison at times, and headlines the musical’s best number “El Mal,” which takes place at a charity dinner. But it’s Gomez who, though saddled with the most underwritten character, consistently brings the most strength and grit to her musical performances (if you’ve ever listened to her music, you know that Gomez is not the most forceful singer in the world, so this is saying something). Everyone else, however, is singing music that sounds like the filler songs in “Les Misérables” at the strength of a whisper – quiet, breathy, cracking, and frankly, not very good. Opera promises huge emotion and swelling orchestrations, but in “Emilia Pérez,” everything is small and halting.
Still, when a musical number interrupts the action in “Emilia Pérez,” it offers somewhat a reprieve from the lack of nuance in the characters and storytelling. After Emilia and Rita reunite and bring Jessi and the children back to Mexico, they happen upon a mother whose child was killed by a cartel. This causes Emilia to begin to reflect on all of the terrible things – including torture and murder – that she has done in her past. Apparently, this never crossed her mind in the intervening four years since she last saw Rita.
Emilia has the capacity to be a deeply complex character – someone who we root for to live as she wants while actively reckoning with the sins of her past. The film, however, flattens her down to one dimension. The way the character is drawn never makes it feel like she’s dealing with remorse or guilt in any meaningful way. About halfway through the film, Emilia starts a nonprofit to help identify the bodies of cartel victims. From the movie’s point of view, this is enough. We rarely spend any real time with the people who are looking for their missing and murdered family members, and when we do, it’s a woman (Adriana Paz) looking for her abusive husband. She’s happy he’s gone, and tells Emilia so, absolving her further.
The way Emilia’s transness factors into the narrative is also flattened. In one scene where Emilia is angry over an argument she has had with Jessi, her voice lowers in register, returning to its timbre pre-transition. The framing of rage as a solely masculine feeling, and even more so the painting of Emilia’s womanhood as a sort of performance that falls away when she feels anger, pushes forward that one-dimensional, stereotypical feeling – something the film can’t escape.
