“Emilia Pérez” Review

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A musical always runs the risk of the theatrics overwhelming any thematic core it might’ve been aiming for. Emilia Pérez is one such case. It’s a film that tries to swirl aspects of Mexican cartels, transgender surgery, and the questioning of law, stringing them all along with operatic lyrics and dance. If there was something lavish about these sequences, perhaps the glitz might’ve blinded me from the faults of a film that rarely develops its dramatic components. A film with a conflicted trangender woman and a morally uncertain lawyer shouldn’t feel so disjointed and meandering, but how else can I look at a film that stops a fundraiser for a vicious rap-style number about criminals and vaginal hair?

There are three characters in this sloppy drama that cross paths. Zoe Saldana plays Rita Mora Castro, a Mexican lawyer who can turn the most guilty of clients into innocent men. The cartel leader taps her skills, Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón). But he, or, instead, she, doesn’t want Rita’s services for covering up a drug deal or murder. Instead, Manitas wants gender transition surgery and Rita is the lawyer who can make it happen. Rita’s hard work eventually makes this dream a reality, but at the cost of Manitas turning away her family to become Emilia Pérez. Among the two children, Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), is left grieving for her husband’s supposed death. So, when Emilia decides she wants her kids to rejoin her, there are some rocky roads ahead for the secrets buried.

There’s plenty to work with in that narrative, but the film darts all around where none of the three characters feel like fully developed characters. Musical numbers meant to expand on their character end up reducing them. Rita has several moral dilemmas regarding legality, but there’s rarely a moment where she doesn’t feel like a tool for Emilia, practically becoming a telephone operator between the channels of Emilia and Jessi. Emilia’s wavering amid desire, acceptance, and penance never really finds a flow, where it always feels like her songs play like a siren call that bends Rita more than the guns. Jessi’s descension into finding romance with a pimp feels like it should hold some greater fall from grace, but all it does it puts the pieces in place for an action-packed finale, where guns go off and cars explode.

The musical numbers are more baffling than whimsical. There are mixed feelings in the weirdly enthusiastic number of Rita interviewing a gender-transition surgeon. Although Rita is forced into this job, there’s a weird exuberance when lyrically interviewing a doctor, with whimsical questions about penises and Adam’s apples. How should we feel about Rita’s first in-person meeting with Emilia in London? Fear for Rita’s safety as she’s scared she’ll be killed off for evidence of Manitas? Or is it sweet sympathy for Emilia’s longing for her children? The tone is all over the place with the music, to say nothing of the fact this is a film which mostly takes place in Mexico and never feels like a Mexican film, made incredibly evident by this being from a French director who did not film in Mexico.

Emilia Pérez’s narrative of cartels and gender transition is reduced to melodramatic fluff by forcing itself into the musical genre. More effort seems to have been placed in the synchronized chorus and lyrical passages than any of the characters who feel more like props for the next tense confrontation. With this artificial lattice, scenes of chopped off fingers and sincere parental connections at bedtime feel like clips from an entirely different movies. The disjointed nature makes it hard to appreciate all the effort that went into making this operatic staging, hoping that the drama would somehow be found in the many steps and high notes. The end result feels more like a cobbling of ideas lost in the edit, where any hope of saying something more about the transgender experience or the cartel lifestyle are drowned in musical noise.