There has already been discourse around Jacques Audiard’s extraordinary (we can surely agree on that adjective) tilt at a Spanish-language, narco-trans musical in shades of telenovela. There will be more. The news that a cis Frenchman took on the task is alone enough to generate heat. Well, the director of A Prophet, Dheepan and The Sisters Brothers has never shied from a challenge. There is a sense of a film confidently shouldering its way through the baying crowd with only modest concern for delicate sensitivities. Chutzpah is not in short supply.
The film is named for its (eventual) pivotal character, but the protagonist is surely a rising lawyer named Rita. We early on get the sense that she feels uncomfortable about keeping scores of villains from the prisons of Mexico City. Played with hard-eyed determination by a never-better Zoë Saldaña, Rita is, before the film has cleared its throat, flinging herself into dance numbers with the proletariat.
The songs by Clément Ducol and Camille sit in that comfortable spot for contemporary musicals: effective in the cinema, less than memorable after you leave. Damien Jalet’s choreography is, however, sufficiently muscular to close the deal. The film lives in the non-diegetic melodic space carved out during Hollywood’s golden years (and followed up by Audiard’s compatriot Jacques Demy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg).
The film is also a Gothic fairy-tale. There is a hint of that when a rumbling voice on the phone summons Rita to a secret spot on the promise of untold wealth. There, after a hooded car ride, she sits before a looming drug overlord, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón). One can imagine all kinds of reasons for such a person needing a good lawyer, but nothing has prepared Rita for what is to come. Manitas wants to transition from male to female. Her job is to find a surgeon who can complete the process, and to keep the secret from Manitas’s wife (Selina Gomez, making much of an ancillary role) and his loving family.
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Rita arranges the operation in Israel, helps fake her client’s death and spirits the family to Switzerland for their own “protection”. The lawyer then retires to London and the curtain figuratively descends on a crazy first act. (That curtain will surely come down literally, on an inevitable stage show, in a few years.) Even in an era of eccentrically themed musicals, few shows have sent the crowds out still tapping toes to a number so eccentric as La Vaginoplastia. So, yes, chutzpah.
It is in the second act that fairy-tale logic really takes over. After shenanigans we won’t spoil, Emilia Pérez, as Manitas has become, re-enters the family group in the guise of a long-lost cousin. A few reviews from Cannes compared the scenario to Mrs Doubtfire, and, yes, there is something of that lunacy here. But the atmosphere is altogether more heightened, more magical, more Brothers Grimm.
Gascón, the first trans performer to win best actress at Cannes, really comes into her own in those deliberately dumbfounding later adventures. It is a big performance in the style of Joan Crawford or Rosalind Russell. The character’s driving force is now human affection, but the barely addressed violence of her earlier life provides a constant sombre underscore. Hints of late redemption further emphasise the screenplay’s debts to a classical Hollywood arc.
One can understand why not every reasonable person will get on board. Some will worry that gender transition is being used as little more than gimmicky narrative scaffolding. But, for most, the sincere commitment of the actresses will surely brush aside any such reservations. This is a bold, brassy entertainment that breaks new ground as it hugs venerable genres to its chest.
Emilia Pérez is in cinemas from Friday, October 25th, and on Netflix from Wednesday, November 13th
