Welcome to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! Chipping away at this year's nominees....
With that in mind, let's talk about the new crime musical Emilia Perez, directed by Jacques Audiard and starring Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon and Selena Gomez. Emilia Perez concerns a hardworking but unappreciated Mexican lawyer named Rita, whose clientele mostly consists of sleazy businessman types for whom she manages to get acquittals despite thinking they're obviously guilty. One night she receives a mysterious phone call offering millions of tax-free dollars to arrange an unspecified favor. She is blindfolded and thrown in a van, and it turns out her strange benefactor is a powerful drug lord named "Manitas" Del Monte. Manitas enlists Rita to procure a secret gender reassignment procedure so he can disappear and assume a new, fulfilling life as a woman, and also to move his wife and sons to Switzerland to ensure their safety. The plan goes off without a hitch, but things become complicated when Emilia Perez, as Manitas is now known, wants her family back by her side in Mexico. Rita helps Emilia establish the subterfuge that she is Manitas's wealthy distant cousin, now a philanthropist helping the families of drug cartel victims.
This is all thematically rich material and is boosted by strong performances by all involved. Saldana gives one of her best performances to date as Rita, the pragmatic, conflicted lawyer who's become so disillusioned with the corrupt system she's willing to take a chance on this outlandish illegal scheme. Selena Gomez is hardened and guarded as Manitas's wife Jessi, who loves Manitas but is aware he's cheated on her, and hopes to start over with someone else. And Karla Sofia Gascon is both tender and brutal as Emilia, ashamed of her status as a murderous drug kingpin and theorizing that her gender dysphoria was the reason she made such destructive choices in life. But there's always the danger that her violent past will catch up with her, no matter how much she tries to make good. Even without the transgender element this theme would still work; is it ever possible to truly start over from a life of crime?
While all of the aforementioned facets of the film work quite well, unfortunately the musical stuff doesn't. The songs written by French singer Camille aren't very compelling or memorable at all, and the production numbers try to stay within the gritty realism of the story but don't land. Instead the flow of the narrative is interrupted with awkward songs that honestly aren't sung very well. Gascon is a fine actor but a singer she is not. I think Emilia Perez would've worked so much better as a straightforward crime drama; the acting chops are there and the story is a unique twist on the "criminal changes identity to start over" trope. But it all gets undermined when people start singing. It's a clash of styles that just don't mesh.
On balance I'd give Emilia Perez a mild recommendation; there's enough there to make it worth a watch.
I give the film *** out of ****.
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