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 Heart Skipped, about a young man who wants to break away from his criminal family to become a musician (based on James Toback’s 1978 film, Fingers). And then, what is probably his most acclaimed film, A Prophet, about a young Muslim man who becomes connected in prison with one of France’s most powerful villains.
You see the theme?
Audiard started working with writer Thomas Bidegain on A Prophet and they have teamed on 4 of his 5 movies since.
Audiard took a bit of a turn towards romance moving forward, though the edge was still firmly in place. Rust and Bone is about a violent, uneducated man and a spiritual, high-thinking woman brought together by an unkind fate. Dheepan, which won the Palme D’or but (unfairly) got kicked by critics who missed it late in the festival that year, is an of-the-moment take on Michael Winner and Wendell Mayes’s Death Wish, focused on an immigrant family that is under siege.
The Sisters Brothers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly as The Brothers, who are professional murderers in 1851 but really want to join the gold rush, is a mad classic from 2018. It’s one of those movies that just gets better and better every time you watch it.
Paris, 13th District is a complex comedy of sexes that kinda got lost in COVID in 2021.
And now, Emilia Pérez, which is really just Audiard’s second film with a female lead.
On one of my platforms, I recently complained about reviews that don’t talk about the movie much to avoid admitting the critic doesn’t like the movie… and here I am giving you the history of Audiard. But the reason for me is that one of my most clear feelings about the film is that even though it is, as someone wrote, a transgender musical thriller, it is, first and last, a Jacques Audiard movie.
Take away the music and the dancing and the trans in the film and this is still very much an Audiard film. A gangster sees himself as someone completely other than what he has become with his great success and seeks to change his life. But he is too powerful to just quit. In doing this, he needs to balance his choices between his wife and his selected functionary who will clear the path for him. And then it gets complicated!
But that would deny the audience the ingenious twist, that this gangster doesn’t have to simply disappear, but can hide in plain site by fulfilling his deepest truth, that he is a woman in a man’s body. And at the same time, the emotions he has as a human will stay with him once he makes this change to what, for the public, becomes her exterior.
Now add on top of that, the functionary… who in this story happens to also be the lead of the film. What is it to become a hard-working, relentless, underappreciated underdog who is given the keys to the kingdom overnight? What is the weight of carrying secrets? What is it to live in the duality that is so different from her #1 client, but is still a distinct duality?
Then add The Wife, who has been left out on the secret and has to manage the feelings of going from living with a dominant figure and is suddenly both free and captured by her long-established lifestyle and their children.
It’s an operatic idea - Jacques’ wheelhouse - so it actually becomes an operetta, with music by Camille and Clément Ducol, and choreography by Damien Jalet.
And what could be more dramatic and understandable worldwide than a drug cartel, which he places in Mexico and not South America. Is that because the film embraces the big emotions of Mexican television? Maybe.
The story is inspired by a chapter of a book, Écoute, written by Boris Razon. The character that inspired Emilia Pérez wasn’t named Emilia and was a minor character within that one chapter. But it caught Audiard’s attention. He then started working on it as an operetta for the stage, but then decided on making the movie.
The film credits Thomas Bidegain as well as Nicolas Livecchi and Léa Mysius with co-writing duties. But Audiard is the master of his films. He always acknowledges the work of everyone around him who brings these films to life. But he is an artist of clear visions… never more so than here.
The first great surprise of the film is Zoe Saldana, made to look as plain as possible at first with that bone structure, breaking out in song and dance, expressing the emotions of frustration that she can’t show anyone else, for fear of being tossed aside, even though she is the brains of the legal operation in which she is (over)working.
Her character’s burden throughout the film is being both the only absolute truthteller and also keeping the most wild secrets, in every direction. She is the only one who knows pretty much everything. And it both changes her and doesn’t change her. But as the songs that emerge from others are very narrow, her songs tend to be comments of perspective, on those with whom she works and on herself.
The title character of Emilia Pérez is played by Karla Sofía Gascón, who lived in real life as a male and a popular actor until she was 46 and transitioned. She plays the character as both genders in the film, starting as Manitas Del Monte, who has lived a full life and has become the top drug lord in Mexico. He carries his secret about who he really is inside and it becomes a big part of his success, always hiding the secret from the violent men around him by expressing greater male rage and violence than any other. The Emilia Pérez he becomes in the world is a grande dame, really, living a life about making life better for others, many of whom were limited or even destroyed by Del Monte. In this, the idea of a full picture of who we all are, beyond gender, which so preoccupies all of us. And at the same time, she is a woman in her 50s who unavoidably carries the habits of a long life with her.
The third member of this trio is Del Monte’s wife, played by Selena Gomez. In a movie of women, she is the one major character who is not really making choices. She is the beautiful wife who got the endless money and the kids and all the things that so many young women hope to find. But after losing her husband, who is now Emilia, she is suddenly free to make choices…. to live her life, breaking free of the proverbial golden birdcage.
Really, each of the three women at the center of this film are aspiring to freedom and weighed down by both their pasts and themselves.
AUDIARD!!!!! (read in your best Riccardo Montalban yell)
You really could not ask for a filmmaker who has gone as many places in his drama as Audiard. Inside a dog’s head to prison to whale training to 1851 to modern ghettos of immigrants in London, Audiard takes his audiences somewhere fresh and fascinating every time out… but the story of these souls, searching for peace, challenging expectations, pushing themselves further than they ever imagined themselves capable… that is the consistent signature.
There is something wonderfully liberating about films that break the boundaries we expect from them. It allows our minds to wander beyond the normal boundaries as well… encourages it. Sudden leaps into songs and dances break the fourth wall. And I loved how it was executed. But more than that, each time it happens, it resets us as an audience and we bring ourselves to the material having moved forward a step since the previous reset. The brevity of the numbers mean that we don’t fall into them the way we might in a traditional musical. They are not individual moments meant to be what the big memorable moments, like we expect in traditional musical theater. They are part of this journey.
So I don’t think of Emilia Pérez and a “trans musical” or whatever tag we are putting on it this week. Those elements are there, of course. But it’s another powerful Audiard movie about people in extreme circumstances to me. And those elements, and so many others, are tools to give it the emotional muscularity that it has.
I look forward to watching it at least a couple more times, because I have yet to seen an Audiard movie that doesn’t get better on multiple viewings. The surfaces are so shiny that it takes a few looks to really feel the subtexts fully. Even writing this review seems a little premature a week after seeing the film because it is still bouncing around in my thoughts. Writing helps me clarify… but the work itself does so even more.
Emilia Pérez won’t be for everyone. And that’s okay too. But I hope it is for you. Don’t try to hard to figure every detail out… go on this ride… let Audiard pull on your heart and soul… and let it be about you as much as it is about the characters. Because it is. That’s the way Jacques rolls.