By – Gareth Jones

For fans of Jacques Audiard, Selena Gomez, Trans stories, innovative musicals

Jacques Audiard has now made 10 feature films in 30 years.  He is an artist who is consistently challenging himself and his medium, film.  Most often he creates new experiences with sound and vision in films such as A Prophet, Rust and Bone, Read My Lips, and Dheepan..  Other times, he plays with the expectations of genres such as The Sister Brothers and The Beat That My Heart Skipped.  With Emilia Pérez he does it all.

Based on an opera that he wrote, Audiard challenges our expectations for a musical.  Most significantly it is the plot.  Here, he tells the story of a young lawyer Rita, (portrayed exceptionally by Zoe Saldana) who is hired by a Mexican drug lord, Manitas, to help him with faking his death so that he can transition to a woman. This is particularly challenging as he has a wife Jessi (stunningly played by Selena Gomez) and two young sons. Rita, after doing a lot of research is able to find a surgeon, fake the death of Manitas, and safely move Jessi and the two sons to safety in Switzerland. Four years later, Manitas is now Emilia, and finds Rita to tell her that she wants to be reunited with her children. Emilia is played remarkably by the Spanish actor Karla Sofía Gascón, who began her own transition in 2016.  Obviously, this makes the performance all the more personal and realistic. She was awarded along with the other lead actress Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival and has now been nominated for a Golden Globe.  In both cases, this is the first trans woman to be given these honors. It would be wonderful to see the Academy repeat this honor.  It is a true breakout performance worthy of recognition.  Her voice is able to tell the story with such beauty and heartache.

Of course, this would all make a fantastic drama, but it makes an even more astonishing musical.  Each performance requires singing and everyone is up to the challenge.  You do have actors known for their singing like Selena Gomez, but it is the singing of Karla Sofía Gascón that is heartbreaking and haunting.  Along with Gomez and Saldana, the film centers the stories of women and all deliver nuanced and distinctive performances.  It also tells the story of the “disappeared”, thousands of people who have been kidnapped and killed as part of the drug wars in Mexico and beyond.  Audiard uses the musical genre to tell very heartbreaking and challenging stories, but does so with artistry and empathy.

As with all Audiard films, the cinematography is always brilliant this time with Paul Guihaume, their third collaboration.  The camera moves with grace and vitality as it moves to the music and movement of the characters.  The music and lyrics were written by the duo of French singer Camille and scorer Clément Ducol.  Camille has had many hits in France but here she was able to work with a translator to write the original songs in Spanish.  The songs are enlivening and enchanting, and provide the platform for the creative expression of all the artists.  As a musical, there are also some marvelous dance sequences choreographed by Damien Jalet.

Ultimately, the story is one of following your own path and embracing the real person that you are.  This is a form of freedom that Audiard has continually examined in his films.  I had always been partial to Le Prophet as his masterpiece, but now it has some strong competition from Emilia Pérez.

Available to stream on Netflix.