Emilia Pérez is a movie that crosses the boundaries of genre and goes its own way. French director Jacques Audiard takes a fresh approach to the telling of what might have been a standard crime drama if it was in the hands of any other filmmaker.
The basic story is about an attractive, successful lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) who is hired by a ruthless cartel boss, Manitas Del Monte (played by Karia Sofia Gascón) to help him retire from a life of crime and become the alter-ego person he has always wanted to be. That is to say, the woman he has always dreamed of being.
The plan involves staging his own death, having sex-changing surgery and then joining his wife Jessi (Salina Gomez) and two sons in Switzerland, pretending to be Del Monte’s sister whom they have never met.
As one might imagine, things can get very complicated with a story like this. There is always the possibility of being found out in ways that the crime boss never imagined. On one level, Emilia Pérez is a juicy soap opera of a story with well-written characters and delicate interactions.
On another level, it is a terrifying crime drama with all the blood and brutality of ruthless organized crime.
On yet another level, it is a strange, sweet love story about a man who becomes a woman who then interacts with and bonds with a woman who is his wife but thinks he’s someone else. In a “girl-chat moment,” he discovers that she feared him in his past life but never really loved him.
The more he’s around Jessi, the more he falls in love with her, all over again, from an entirely different perspective. But the love soon turns into jealousy and anger as he helplessly watches her fall in love with another man, unable to do anything about it without revealing his secret identity.
It's a complicated story, that Jacques Audiard tells by switching between subtitles dialog and English dialog. Occasionally, the characters break into song and dance, a choice that might seem strange and totally inappropriate for a movie like this but, in the end, it all works.
The movie is well-written and well directed, and it has the A-list support of Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez. It’s refreshing to see Zoe back in a non-Super Hero role though she’s had a successful career playing bigger-than-life, fantasy characters in movies like Avatar (2009), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Star Trek(2009). She proves that she can handle a tough, dramatic role and is without question, one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars.
Likewise, Selena Gomez takes on perhaps her most serious role as the victimized wife of a frightening criminal. Fans of her portrayal of Mabel in the TV series Only Murders in the Building will see Selena take it to another level as a tough, resilient survivor in a world of bloody violence and terror.
Add to that the strong performance of Karla Sofia Gascón who is convincing as Manitas Del Monte, before and after sex change surgery, as both a man and a woman. It’s a challenging role of extreme opposites—a brutal man and a loving, caring woman—that is central to the story. The success of the movie rests on the believability of this character.
Director Jacques Audiard performs a delicate balancing act of storytelling, presenting complex characters and relationships, all the while effortlessly moving back and forth between languages (Spanish and English) and film forms (movie drama and movie musical).
It’s an ambitious project with a freeform approach that all comes together in the end (which some could argue is a bit of a stock soap opera finale). Nevertheless, the story is immensely entertaining overall and well worth watching.
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