THB #595: Emilia Pérez

I love Jacques Audiard.

My love affair started with Baxter, the 1989 film that he wrote with the film’s director, Jérôme Boivin. That’s 35 years ago, in Los Angeles’ NuArt theater, watching a movie about “a dog who thinks.” This dog is a pit bull who goes from keeper to keeper, at peace with doing anything to smell and eat what he likes… until he meets what would be the human version of himself, a young boy who enjoys causing pain… and Baxter, after first being thrilled, confronts the idea of a moral universe. (At least that is my siimplified, one paragraph take.)

The film is, on the surface, a piece of genre entertainment… but it commands serious consideration of the human condition. And that, for me is the signature of this filmmaker’s remarkable career.

Audiard started directing his own screenplays in 1994, but his hot run that included consistent American releases really started with Read My Lips, a thrilled centered on a deaf woman and criminal she falls for. Then, The Beat My He…