Emilia Pérez dominated. It’s a bad movie.

by Jacques Audiard Emilie Pérez is the most fascinating film I watched last year, in a completely negative way. Its 132 minutes unfold like a scintillating, garish tour de force of disaster, a relentless procession of terrible ideas, terribly executed. It’s also the precise kind of preening cinematic onanism that Hollywood types like to consider visionary, and it’s the reason why the film’s triumph at the Golden Globes was just followed by 13 Oscar nominations from the from the academy’s voters.

Emilie Pérez is a musical comedy set in present-day Mexico that tells the story of its main character (played by Karla Sofía Gascón), who begins the film as Manitas Del Monte, a murderous and terrifying drug lord who recently consolidated its power by annihilating its competitors and buying off politicians. Despite these professional triumphs, Manitas harbors a secret desire, in the character’s words, “to be a woman”, enticing the film’s other main protagonist, lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), into a plan to kill her. help to undergo a litany of gender. affirming surgical operations (and I use “litany” here in its ecumenical sense – in one scene the medical names of all the different procedures are chanted) while faking Manitas’ death and staging surgeries. so that the wife and children of the former drug trafficker (Selena Gomez) are surreptitiously transferred to Switzerland. All of this happens in one way or another within the first 40 minutes of the film. The rest of the film deals with Emilia’s attempted reunion with her children (who, after four years in Switzerland, are somehow persuaded to return to live with Emilia in Mexico under the pretext that she is the “distant cousin” of their deceased father) as well as her path to personal redemption as she falls in love and founds a non-profit organization dedicated to searching for the remains of Mexicans murdered and disappeared by the cartels of drug, thus becoming a national hero.

If this all sounds both ridiculous and potentially extremely offensive, you’re on the right track. Mexican viewers criticized the film’s sensationalist and deeply retrograde depiction, depicting their country as a failed state ravaged by violence, as well as Audiard’s apparent disinterest in anything resembling cultural authenticity. None of the film’s stars were born in Mexico (Gomez is a third-generation Mexican American but had to learn Spanish for the role), and almost none of the films were filmed in Mexico; After making several location scouting trips, Audiard finally chose to shoot most of the film on locations in Paris. (The director cited the difficulties of filming musical numbers on location as the main reason for this choice, but one also wonders whether the Mexico he encountered on his scouting trips was not “Mexico”) of her imagination.) LGBTQ+ voices criticized the film’s awkward depiction of gender transition, with GLAAD decrying the film as a “deeply retrograde portrait of a trans woman.” In a terrific article for The Cut, writer Harron Walker dissected the film’s ridiculously obtuse depiction of medical transition while wryly noting that “a movie about a rich trans woman trying to redeem herself before transitioning by founding a non-profit organization that purports to help others has the potential to be hilarious, biting and current,” a satirical possibility that completely eludes Audiard, whose film only becomes more and more humorless as you go let it unfold.

Were Emilie Pérez simply an abomination of content, that would be one thing. But what truly elevates the film to its rarefied level of cinematic absurdities is that it is also an abomination of form. The hyperactive pursuit of the gee-whiz blurb—you’ve never seen anything like it!– led many people to describe the film as “genre-defying,” or some equivalent term. (The film’s description on Netflix uses this phrase.) But that’s not really true: Emilie Pérez is a musical comedy through and through, and not even a particularly innovative or original one. There are great dance numbers, characters who sing to convey their emotional truths, there’s melodrama and flashy camerawork, and it has an ending that I won’t spoil (although honestly, if you happened so far and you’re still planning to watch this movie, I should probably quit my job), except to say that it’s simply derivative of countless better works. Even the idea that its ostensibly daring subject matter subverts its genre is silly: musicals have been made about serious contemporary themes. problems for almost as long as modern Broadway has existed. (Show boat is almost 100 years old.)

The main reason Emilie Pérez doesn’t scan as a conventional musical because, as a musical, it is completely incompetent. With the exception of Gomez, no one on screen is a visibly talented singer, which might not have been a fatal problem if the material they were tasked with singing wasn’t so awful. The film has no unifying musical aesthetic to speak of: almost every song feels like a phoned-in mish-mash of clichés pilfered from the most banal corners of pop, rock, and hip-hop. (Indeed, the film’s songs and score, composed by French songwriters Camille and Clément Ducol, seem almost studiously ignorant of Mexico’s illustrious musical traditions.) The result is a cacophonous mess with no memorable melody to speak of, no talk about a halfway decent sound. original song.

Most successful musicals use songs to punctuate moments of emotional intensity: a big musical number creates the effect of feeling on screen going beyond the conventional limits of the story. “Singin’ in the Rain” is a great spectacle and a catchy tune, but what makes the scene and performance so indelible is how it showcases the romantic intoxication that the film has already so carefully constructed . The music in Emilie Pérez doesn’t do that: the first big song-and-dance number comes less than five minutes into the film, in which Rita leads a massive chorus of poor, brutalized Mexicans through an ersatz Mexico City, belting out lines about ” misery” of the country. » while people around her literally stab each other to death in the streets. It’s sordid and cynical stuff, but it’s also just artistically inert. Rather than enhancing the film’s narrative, the music functions as a noisy, gimmicky distraction from the narrative that can’t be bothered to do even the most basic job of connecting its audience to its setting and characters .

Audiard has frequently cited the influence of The Umbrellas of CherbourgJacques Demy’s 1964 French New Wave masterpiece, in which every line of dialogue is sung, describing it as a musical “with both political and historical context, and perhaps this is for this I created Emilie Pérez.” (Demy’s film is set against the backdrop of the Algerian War, which is not actually depicted in the film but is crucial to its plot.) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of my favorite films, and believe me, there is not a single piece of music in Emilie Pérez who keeps a candle at bay to UmbrellasThe main theme of love, “I Could Never Live Without You”, the melody of which, if you have already seen the film, is probably already running through your head right now. But even more, much of what makes Umbrellas the everyday, understated nature of its story is so touching, that of young lovers thwarted first by circumstances, then by the complexities of adulthood before finally being reunited in one of the great emotionally ambivalent endings of all the films. In other words, what makes Umbrellas so singular is its marriage of fantastical formal elements (namely its musical setting and its spectacular cinematography and sets) with a plot firmly rooted in human realism. Emilie Pérezon the other hand, combines these fantastical elements with outlandish plots and confused moral grandiloquence, leaving us with a message film that doesn’t even seem to know what it wants to be about.

What exactly is it Emilie Pérez am I trying to say? The most generous interpretation would be that it is a statement about the importance of self-acceptance and self-realization as paths to redemption: through her gender transition, Emilia Pérez is able to access a new and more authentic life as a morally upright and positive force. in society. This seems harmless enough until one considers that the idea that suffering from gender dysphoria somehow correlates with a propensity for serial murder is also the central idea of The silence of the lambs. At the beginning of the film, Rita sings to a skeptical surgeon: “Changing the body changes society; changing society changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society; changing society changes everything,” which seems to be the closest the film gets to a thesis statement. But it’s also a silly sentiment, with distinctly reactionary implications. After all, the idea that what individuals choose to do with their bodies impacts “societies” and “souls” is the logic that underlies almost every form of intolerance under the sun, and transphobia in particular. What are we really doing here? That Emilie Pérez never even seems to arise, this question tells you everything you need to know about how little he thinks about his characters, his themes and You.

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