Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez (2024)

 

And the moral of the story is.... will someone please think of the poor children (who appear to sing and plead for help as tiny heads all set against a black backdrop because otherwise how would we get the message to the dummies watching on their phones)! And that criminal drug cartel dealer who really had just a sweet and compassionate soul just waiting to come out once all the estrogen got into her system....

This sucks. I think this single handedly gave me athlete's foot. Somehow Jacques Audiard makes a case for himself as much less adept and understanding of what makes a Musical Movie crossed with an "important" message to work than Todd Phillips... I'll expand on this thesis momentarily... and here we go:

Emilia Perez has a (to quote Joe Pesci to Michael Imperioli in Goodfellas) a lot of problems. What stands out though as at best a miscalculation and at worst something insulting to any audience with two brain cells to rub together is how Jacques Audiard tells this ludicrous story and it's misbegotten tonal incoherence.

This is a story where we have a drug dealing violent cartel boss who all but holds Zoe Saldana's lawyer character at gunpoint to arrange a gender transition operation, and we get the sense perhaps there is something of a "soul" to this Manitas person - both he and the title character played by Gascon - but then the movie cuts ahead four years later once Emilia has settled into being... good now, and when she meets with Rita (Saldana) again Rita is somehow not only okay with this person who she previously had to arrange a clandestine sex change for because of the threat of violence and so on, but brings Emilia on to her operation to (checks notes which wait I gave up they are now ripped up and tossed in the air out of spite) help the victims families of those who have been disappeared and killed by other drug cartels.

A critical wound to the storytelling is that Audiard doesn't show us anything of what Emilia went through in those four years when she awakes on the hospital bed the person she really always wanted to be (maybe I'm giving the movie too much credit with even that reading but I'll try); but this still doesn't square away with the fact that, once Audiard settles into telling us about what kindness and even saintly qualities Emilia has about her (and Gascon plays it to be about as exciting as reading a driver's manual), we barely get any sense of the fact that... wait this was a rotten drug cartel boss, no?

And the idea perhaps (half) baked in somewhere here is that once someone transitions their body they can also try to chart a new course in life, but in the story this plays out as one of those hackneyed dumbass storylines where Rita sees in two seconds that this is really the human she helped arrange the whole sex/life change while Emilia's kids and the Selema Gomez ex wife character have no idea and of course Emilia won't say anything about who she actually is and oh god just kill me now. What I mean is, for what Audiard is getting at in this story to work there either should a) be more of a sense that this is taking place on some actual reality; but because this is a MUSICAL it also has to remind us of the fantasy spaces that these humans inhabit.... and it sucks as a Musical, or b) go into just being a dark comedy about how these are all actually pretty bad people for the most part. Then again that would mean Audiard had a sense of humor, and that isn't so apparent here.

I almost am on the verge of saying this is kind of insulting to Trans (and/or other) viewers since it implies that, well, all you needed to do was Transition and that was what was keeping you from being uh... a good person, I guess? But that may even be reductive... or maybe not. Maybe I am just reacting to the fact that once Emilia is Emilia, the movie is just spinning its wheels with badly written relationships and sandwiched in like meat and bread from a dilapidated bodega are songs that have some of the most pretentious lyrics imaginable.

It's not all the actors fault I should say as Saldana tries to imbue some force and life into Rita and her singing (certainly she is much better at it than Gascon, I don't want to be mean but based on what she's given and how she's directed I'm not convinced she can sing a lick). At the same time, 9 times out of 10 when the characters started to break into verse I just went "oh, no" and wanted to hide under a blanket. 

This is badly done essentially because Audiard can't mesh his own more grounded Naturalistic sensibilities - the ones that had led to very good to even great films in the past like The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Un Prophete, Rust and Bone, even something slighter like The Sisters Brothers felt like it took place in our actual earth reality - with something that is more of an even satisfyingly sad Musical movie, and it is unmemorable music that doesn't spring organically from any emotions in the scenes where it crops up. 

It is hard not to think of it due to recency, but I thought of another film and filmmaker who also went into a weird path with a dramatic musical, Joker Folie a Deux. But even there at least there was some (if divorced from context) satisfying set pieces and Lady Gaga occasionally given something to do or sing, and the misery was consistent with what came before in those films. Here, it's like Emilia Perez is just a weird fucking Neo-Liberal wish fulfilment vehicle for a Better World where the.... children of Mexican drug cartel kills get some justice and aren't orphans anymore, I guess?

*Think of the Orphans - that's a bumper sticker, right?

This was a baffling and painful situation, made only a little tolerable because of the fact I could watch it and talk and question it in the comfort of my home on Netflix - and even with a great OLED screen, some of this movie is downright garish to look at, where the color palette is not that good or flattering to the actors - and the longer it went on, and it is much too long, I just kept throwing my hands up and going "what are we DOING here?"

I'm perturbed even by what Audiard was going for using the Mexican drug cartels and the world of violence and chaos mixed with this lame Trans family drama where Saldana gets pushed to the wayside for much of the run time for this frankly boring character. And it is even more bewildering just how this and Megalopolis came out of the same giant Cannes film festival and while that was of course a giant head scratcher it was at least *fun* to watch and digest. This is so high on its own supply, and it is garnering awards left and right and... for what? What kind of empathy are we supposed to take away from this except that this character is... worthy of a parade in the streets after becoming a martyr?

Emilia Perez is a boondoggle, and the worst crime of all is that it leaves its actors (to paraphrase the great existential philosopher.... Venom) like turds in the wind.

(*that one goes out to my wife who hated this more than I did. I'm surprised she hasn't started to keep track of all the names of the cast and crew like Arya Stark or something. One more thing, she made a fabulous point which is that a film that exists already this year, Sing Sing, and is *great* by the way, that is doing what Emilia Perez wants to show which is how someone who has done bad things can change their life and find some better path and to do it all with deep wells of empathy).