Director Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez” is a grim, largely humorless drama about a former cocaine cartel kingpin starting a new life devoted to helping widows and orphans of the thousands murdered or disappeared during the drug wars. Oh, and it’s also a schmaltzy family story about an estranged transgender parent who comes up with a scheme to keep in contact with her kids that’s so screwy Mrs. Doubtfire might like a word. The film is a bloody, violent tragedy set in the streets of Mexico City but also a splashy musical shot almost entirely on Paris soundstages. You might be wondering how these disparate elements and clashing tones could possibly work together. The answer is about as well as you think.
One watches “Emilia Pérez” the way you’d stare at a duck-billed platypus or one of those exotic animals made of mismatched parts that Robin Williams once cited as proof that God gets stoned. It’s the year’s most mystifying movie experience. It’s also shaping up to be the most divisive. “Emilia Pérez” won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and there’s been hyperbolic praise from press members calling it the best film of 2024. Another critic told me it’s the worst movie he’s seen in at least five years. For some, the sheer audacity of the project is praise-worthy, and you certainly don’t see something like this every day. Yet for all its unconventional creative choices, I found “Emilia Pérez” to be a curiously enervating affair, joyless and leaden where it should soar. I spent the train ride home shaking my head in befuddlement.
Karla Sofía Gascón stars as the title character, who fakes her death and transitions from a bloodthirsty crime boss to a glamorous philanthropist with the help of a brilliant attorney (Zoe Saldana) fed up with dim-bulb male superiors taking credit for her hard work. There’s a kooky “you go, girl!” empowerment fantasy happening here amid the tacky metaphorical trappings, with Emilia literally surgically removing her toxic masculinity so that she can begin to find happiness and make amends for past misdeeds.
Pretending to be a long-lost cousin of the deceased kingpin, Emilia keeps her unsuspecting ex (Selena Gomez) around so she can still spend time with their kids — adorable little moppets who sing songs sometimes about how their new auntie smells like their dead dad. Emilia even falls in love with one of the drug war widows (Adriana Paz) whose husband she might have had killed in her previous life. But any potentially interesting questions of Emilia’s guilt and complicity are conveniently elided when we find out the guy was an abusive jerk to begin with. Instead, we watch the two women flirt across a crowded office by playfully flashing knives and pistols at each other.
This is pretty silly stuff, but the movie treats it like dreary social realism. The tale’s lurid aspects cry out for the reckless, camp sensibility of a young Pedro Almodóvar, yet the 72-year-old Audiard is better known for hard-edged crime pictures like 2009’s great prison drama “A Prophet” or the somber 2012 romance “Rust and Bone,” in which Marion Cotillard was partially eaten by an orca and the movie kept a straight face the entire time. He insists on shooting “Emilia Pérez” in a rough-hewn “naturalistic” style that mutes the story’s melodramatic excesses. And what is the point of a story like this without melodramatic excesses?
One of the reasons so many modern musicals are so bad is because contemporary filmmakers don’t bother trying to create a stylized world in which characters could conceivably burst into song. This slavish addiction to so-called “realism” is a ruinous thing for movies, especially movie musicals. More than once during “Emilia Pérez” I was reminded of Tom Hooper’s disastrous 2012 adaptation of “Les Misérables,” which used herky-jerky, hand-held close-ups to create a gritty, historically accurate French Revolution in which everyone was singing Broadway show tunes. You’ve got to lean into the artificiality for the whole conceit to make sense.
“Emilia Pérez” was filmed in France, mostly in front of greenscreens, which accounts for the cramped quality of the film’s faux-exteriors. Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume degrade the image to try and blend the ersatz backgrounds, giving the picture a grainy, smudgy quality that goes with the seasick shaky cam. It’s the same visual shorthand filmmakers have used to stereotype Mexico ever since Steven Soderbergh took the camera off the tripod and slapped a urine-colored filter on the lens 24 years ago in “Traffic,” and it might be a nice change of pace someday to see the place presented in full color.
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The musical numbers in “Emilia Pérez” have a timid quality, as if being too extravagant or pleasurable to watch would somehow compromise the movie’s dour self-seriousness. The actresses are occasionally flanked by half a dozen backup dancers or so, sometimes simply walking behind them, and the songs occasionally bring them all from flat bedroom sets to sparse black box stages awash in hard, unflattering spotlights. I guess too much glamour might detract from the grit. These are not songs you will be humming on the way home, not even the one that tries to find words that rhyme with “vaginoplasty.” (We’re reaching a crisis point when it comes to the shortage of memorable songs in movie musicals. Last winter, I counted three — “Wonka,” “The Color Purple” and “Mean Girls” — without a single catchy tune in any of them.)
Gascón, Gomez, Saldana and Paz all shared the Best Actress award at Cannes this year, which is interesting since all four seem to be acting like they’re in completely different films. Saldana is emphatically over-earnest — though clearly the best dancer of the bunch — while Paz is touchingly subtle and Gascón can’t ever find a convincing midpoint between Emilia’s two personas. The saving grace is Gomez, who hurls herself into the material’s trashy, telenovela twists with an iconic bleach job and a diva’s sly self-awareness. I wished I was watching whatever movie she seemed to think she was in.
“Emilia Pérez” opens Friday, Nov. 1 at the Kendall Square Cinema and at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. (Select shows at the Coolidge will be screened on 35mm.)