Review: Emilia Perez – Unearthing the truth

Directed by Jacques Audiard
Starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez

7/10

Filmmaking and storytelling are treated wildly with this new Jacques Audiard movie. His other films have been much more mannered and straight-forward before, but with Emilia Perez, he has let loose with this wild new musical about a drug lord trying to go off the grid, with an audaciousness that mostly works for the film, though sometimes is at a detriment.

Taking place in Mexico, Rita (Zoe Saldana) is a lawyer who is recruited by drug lord Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) to help him go off the grid—this will include him leaving his family but also changing his appearance entirely to ensure he is never caught out by his many enemies. And the way to go through this is gender reaffirming surgery.

Manitas genuinely has gender dysphoria, so this has become the perfect opportunity to get the surgery, though done with the utmost secrecy after consulting with some of the top surgeons in the world. The surgery is a success, with Manitas now going as Emilia Perez, as is the transferring of all of Emelia’s records, though the biggest heartbreak for her is to leave her family, her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two boys.

Four years later, Emilia convinces Rita to be reintroduced to her original family as a distant relative of Manitas’, and Emilia pursues a nonprofit organisation helping families to retrieve the bodies of their relatives who have disappeared and likely been killed by cartel gangs.

There’s quite a decent amount going on in Emeilia Perez, and all the singing and dancing just adds to the hysteria. It’s a bold move to make this kind of story a musical, and it certainly adds an exuberance that gives this film so much life. But it’s also questionable as to why this film is a musical and if there’s any real concrete reason that it has been made this way, especially when a lot of the songs simply aren’t that great, catchy, or memorable; they just seem to push the story only very slightly and in such an awkward manner.

But the dancing side of things is much more entertaining, and all the numbers in this film are incredible to watch, with such amazing choreography from all involved, Saldana in particular, who gives it her all towards this film and its wacky sensibility.

Emilia Perez is certainly a film to be admired, and despite its imperfections and clunky pacing due to the numerous songs, it’s still such a standout film that’s easy to enjoy. It’s entertaining to see such an unrestrained film that really marches to the beat of its own drum, even if that makes certain plot points speed up awkwardly towards the end.

The actual core of the film certainly could’ve been mused on more, but it still offers such entertaining musical numbers performed with gusto by the cast, all amongst one of the more original stories to come from cinema in the past year.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN