Emilia Perez movie review: Selena Gomez starrer is a narco-operatic overture

Emilia Perez movie review

Cast: Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramírez, Mark Ivanir, Eduardo Aladro, Emiliano Hasan
Director: Jacques Audiard
Rating: 3/5
Runtime: 132 min.

This musical drama is set in Mexico where most drug cartels operate. The story is about one such drug kingpin who wants to have a sex change. It's a rather bizarre story but you can't help but be ensnared even though the musical format doesn't do much for the dramatics.

Rita( Zoe Saldana) is an underrated lawyer working for a large law firm more interested in getting criminals out of jail than bringing them to justice. Seeing her initiative in getting even the worst criminals out on a technicality She gets hired by the leader of a criminal organization. He basically wants her to front the sex change operation so that it becomes easier for him to play dead thereafter.

Emilia Pérez is directed and co-written by the acclaimed Palme d'Or-winner Jacques Audiard. It's his 10th feature film so far. The format lof the film lends itself to opera."Emilia Pérez" has elements in the story that are original and therefore gravitating. It's a preposterous rapturous concoction with Spanish-language songs and lyrics that are audacious and soulful.

French director Jacques Audiard shot this narco-opera in Parisian studios with an international cast. The film idea was basically conceived from a chapter in Boris Razon's 2018 novel Écoute. The fact that the co-writer/director is so removed from Mexico, where the film is set, allows for this fiction to be layered and unbound.

Young women protest against femicides in the streets of Mexico City, newspaper front pages bear gruesome photos of vicious acts and in this backdrop the story unfurls. There's a hint of truthfulness in this pursuit of redemption and self-preservation.

Karla Sofía Gascón, a Spanish trans actress displays her range and special talents in a singing double role, first as Manitas Del Monte, a feared drug lord with gender dysphoria, and later as Emilia Pérez, a philanthropist whose nonprofit helps families search for their disappeared loved ones.Within the same lifetime, the victimizer gets to play the rescuer as an attempt to atone for her/his past misdeeds.

But the ruthlessness that is inherent in her/his makeup shows itself quite savagely. It comes to the fore when Manita's wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her two children, relocated to Switzerland, start sharing their home with Emilia.

Are Manita's sins so easily forgivable and forgettable? Shouldn't Emilia be held responsible for the carnage Manitas wrought? The themes of redemption and reconciliation are questionable here. Is such reconciliation even possible?

The musical numbers hamper the momentum even though they are about causes. But Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume make it compelling enough by allowing the choreography to be freewheeling. The aesthetic and thematic components alongside the dizzying imagery are enticing enough. This is a drama of criminality and redemption, with Almodóvarian twists, moments of social realism presented in campy style that pours out as a eventual tragedy.And its quite riveting at that.