Emilia Pérez

Jacques Audiard juggles music, murder and melodrama in his impressive, operatic Cannes prize winner.

Changing sides: Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón
Image courtesy of Netflix.

The writer-director Jacques Audiard doesn’t so much tell a story as wrench the viewer through the lens of his singular narrative. His films are bold, muscular, visually flamboyant statements: not easily forgotten blasts of cinema. Think The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Dheepan… They are not experiences we can ignore.

The Spanish-language Emilia Pérez is a particular curiosity, being a French musical largely set in Mexico based on Audiard’s own opera libretto adapted from an idea posited in a 2018 novel by Boris Razon. Nothing is what it seems, with Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora Castro providing the film’s viewpoint, a lawyer who hates herself and her legal proficiency for slipping killers off the hook. After a particularly successful court case, she is approached by an anonymous figure and is bundled into the back of a van before being confronted by the frightening countenance of the drug kingpin Juan ‘Manitas’ Del Monte. He makes her what seems like an impossible proposal, but with so much money attached, Rita really can’t refuse…

Flitting across the world, from Bangkok to Tel Aviv and on to Switzerland (where it’s always snowing), Emilia Pérez cannot escape its studio space (in Paris), bringing an artificiality to the proceedings that no end of fleeting establishing shots can disguise. But, being a musical, this matters not so much, as the form itself is synthetic by nature. So, there are an enormous number of interiors, and nighttime scenes, introducing a claustrophobia to a larger-than-life tale with operatic tendencies. Spinning from one narrative trajectory to the next, the film embraces corruption, violence, murder, gender dysphoria and parenthood, but is ultimately dealing with identity in all its many forms, along with the infinite possibility of change.

At times, Audiard’s brand of cinematic grandstanding is disassociating for the viewer, where maybe a moment of intimate connection, a human breath, might have brought his characters closer to a sense of empathy. Still, the central female performances are strong, with Zoe Saldaña exhibiting her pipes well and reminding us that she not only delivered the number ‘The Songcord’ from Avatar: The Way of Water, but played Nina Simone in Cynthia Mort’s biopic of the singer. In fact, the four leading performers received a joint best actress award at Cannes this year, proving a particular honour for Gascón, the first trans actor to be so honoured at the festival. As I say, it’s not a film you will easily forget.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Adriana Paz, Selena Gomez, Édgar Ramírez, Mark Ivanir. 

Dir Jacques Audiard, Pro Jacques Audiard, Pascal Caucheteux, Valérie Schermann and Anthony Vaccarello, Screenplay Jacques Audiard, Ph Paul Guilhaume, Pro Des Emmanuelle Duplay, Ed Juliette Welfling, Music Clément Ducol, songs by Camille, Costumes Virginie Montel, Dialect coach Ortos Soyuz. 

Why Not Productions/Page 114/Pathé/France 2 Cinéma/Saint Laurent Productions-Netflix.
132 mins. France. 2024. UK and US Rel: 13 November 2024. Cert. 15.