Starring: Karla Sofia Gascon, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir
Distributor: Rialto Distribution
Runtime: 132 mins. Reviewed in Jan 2025
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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Emilia Pérez follows four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness.
Even if you have heard about Emilia Perez and heard about its drama and its music, its impact is still surprising. Audiard has directed some strong and tough films such as A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and even a Western, The Sisters Brothers, but they don’t quite prepare us for Emilia Perez.
Even without the music, the singing and the dancing, there is a strong narrative. On the one hand, at the centre, is a young lawyer, Rita (Saldana, Golden Globe, Best Supporting Actress), getting murderers off charges, rather disgusted at her and her profession. But, she is abducted, and is confronted by a cartel chief who has a special commission for her – for him to disappear and for his wife and children to get to safety in Switzerland.
Even when we know the plot, the reality of the special commission is still something of a surprise. The issue is trans-gender, the cartel leader becoming Emilia Perez. Both roles are played by Gascon, herself transgender, an imposing performance.
As mentioned, there is a wide range of songs, inserted to dramatise particular characters, different styles of music, dramatic lyrics, sometimes song and dance routines. Rita sings about her life and her attitudes towards her life, the cartel chief sings, Emilia sings, as does the chief’s wife, Jessi (Gomez) and, one of the doctors Rita consults in Tel Aviv about the surgery,
Four years later. Rita is working as a lawyer in London, invited to a dinner, sitting next to an imposing rather glamorous woman – who looks deep into her, and Rita recognises Emilia Perez.
Which means that the second part of the film, while in Mexico, is a story about Emilia trying to bond with her children, posing as an aunt, suspicious of the behaviour of Jessi who links up with a past lover, but, more importantly, the opportunity for a cartel chief to do some kind of good, some reparation, disturbed by the relatives of those who have disappeared, starting a foundation to dig up graves, identify bones, restore some kind of peace to bereaved families. And a complication in a relationship with one of the wives who actually does not grieve the death of her brutal husband.
It has to come to a head, of course, and it does so in a rather Mexican cartel violent fashion.
Punning on the director’s name, some have called the film ‘audacious’. In many ways it is. In many ways unpredictable. And, so often when we are wondering where it is all going, the characters burst into self-identifying songs.
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