‘Emilia Pérez’ breaks genres and bursts into song in a one-of-a-kind movie

Certain movies are sometimes referred to as genre-breaking but “Emilia Pérez” carries this designation to the wildest extreme. It’s a feminist musical crime thriller about a transgender cartel boss. Doubly surprising is that, for all its strangeness – or perhaps because of it – the mashup often works.

Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a Mexican attorney, is fed up wasting her talent successfully defending crooks and killers. Shortly after her latest victory, she is approached by Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a shadowy cartel overlord with a raspy voice and silver-capped teeth. He wants to fake his death so that he can undergo gender-affirming surgery – not to evade justice but to become the woman he has always believed himself to be. If Rita can arrange the disappearance and the surgery – as well as relocating his unknowing “widow” Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two children to Switzerland – she will be rich. 

Warily, inevitably, she agrees. Her motive in accepting the offer is not solely mercenary. Like Manitas, who will become Emilia Pérez (also played by Gascón), she seeks to radically revise her existence. And yet the criminal she is helping is, or was, among the worst of the worst. Without making it explicit, the movie, co-written and directed by Jacques Audiard, makes it clear her newfound wealth is funded by violence and murder.

The moral quandary setting off “Emilia Pérez” is whether these malefactors are capable of reversing the damage of their lives and becoming exemplary human beings. Rita believes it is possible, which is perhaps one reason she accedes to Manitas’s offer. In one of the more spangly musical numbers, set in a Bangkok hospital, Rita belts out, “Changing the body changes the soul/Changing the soul changes society/Changing society changes everything.” 

Why is this film a musical? One plausible answer is: Why not? The characters unveil their innermost musings and fears in song, ranging from whispers to full-throated arias. Audiard has said that he discovered in writing the movie that it was “closer to an operetta than a film script.” It is also, in many ways, an amped-up telenovela, featuring Rita, Emilia, and Jessi as divas on the march.

Saldaña, Gascón, and Gomez – along with Adriana Paz, who appears late in the movie as the Mexican mother of a son who was “disappeared” by the cartels – jointly won the best actress award at the Cannes film festival. (The film is also France’s Oscar entry for best international feature.) For Gascón, a popular Spanish actor who transitioned in 2018, the award represents the first time Cannes has honored a trans artist. 

It’s a strong performance, as are the others, especially Saldaña’s, with its mix of softness and steel. But what keeps Gascón’s from greatness is that we don’t see enough traces of the vicious cartel leader peeking beneath the reborn exterior. This, no doubt, was an intentional directorial choice. Emilia devotes her newfound life to establishing a foundation that helps the families of the disappeared. It is both her mission and her penance. In this film’s moral universe, it would not do to feature too much backsliding. Changing the body changes the soul. 

The movie also makes it a point to stress Emilia’s love for her children. Years after her transition, with Rita now allied in her cause, Jessi and the kids are brought back to Mexico under the pretext of living with Manitas’s loving “cousin,” a woman they’ve never heard of before. The cousin, of course, is Emilia. This development has its “Mrs. Doubtfire” side, but Audiard doesn’t play it for laughs. Emilia’s yearning for her kids is offered up as a maternal archetype. 

What’s off-putting about “Emilia Pérez,” more so than its musical interludes or its genre swapping, is this shimmying between the archetypal and the intensely personal. The characters pour out their hearts in drama and song, and yet I found it difficult to feel deeply for them. I think this is because they are presented not simply as people but as moral avatars. Come what may, they saw the light and reformed their terrible ways. Mission accomplished. 

It’s a lovely, perhaps necessary sentiment. But as this outlandish, one-of-a-kind movie demonstrates at its best, the world is far more complicated than that.

B+ 

Rated R for language, some violent content, and sexual material. In French, English, and Spanish, with subtitles. Currently in theaters and on Netflix starting Nov. 13.