In French auteur Jacques Audiard’s new film Emilia Pérez, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18, Zoe Saldaña plays Rita, a dogged Mexico City attorney who is contacted, in frightening fashion, by the leader of a major drug cartel. This fearsome figure has observed Rita’s work from afar and thinks she might be the right woman for a very sensitive job: researching the best and most discreet doctors to perform gender confirmation procedures on this murderous crime boss.
That’s a more than risky conceit, but Audiard’s steadfast refusal to play it as a joke—this is sincere, sentimental filmmaking—proves wholly winning. The film is captivating even before its chief revelation arrives; from the very first song, Emilia Pérez allures and surprises. Oh, yes: I should mention that Emilia Pérez is also a musical, with lovely and rousing tunes written by French pop musician Camille and a score by Clément Docul. So, this is a musical about a trans cartel boss forsaking her old life and beginning anew, and Selena Gomez is in it too. What a strange and rewarding concoction.
Emilia, as she dubs herself, is played by the Spanish telenovela star Karla Sofia Gascón, all hiss and menace in her pre-transition scenes before she is reborn as a gentle and sophisticated woman of the world. Not everything has been magically changed for the better, though. Emilia misses her wife, Jessi (sharply played by Gomez), and their two young children. Thus she enlists a wary Rita’s help once more, hatching a scheme that will reunite the family in Mexico. Emilia is now posing as a distant cousin of the crime lord, who is assumed dead. As disarmingly sweet as the film can be, Audiard is ever plucking a string of suspense in the background. Emilia was, after all, quite a dangerous person in her previous life, and surrounded herself with dangerous people. This could easily all go horribly wrong. Watching Emilia Pérez, it’s hard to know what tone to trust; is this an uplifiting story of redemption, or of terribly inevitable tragedy?
It’s sort of both, a celebration of the power of positive change and a fable about the far-reaching consequences of violence. On the brighter end of things, Emilia Pérez is a warmhearted depiction—albeit in outsized terms—of the good that results from transition. Emilia stepping into her fullest self is a triumph in its own right, but it also opens her eyes to the errors of her ways, and of the world’s. Emilia becomes a champion of the missing, working with Rita to locate the remains of people who could very well have been killed by her own underlings. Emilia Pérez may exonerate a vicious murder a little quickly, but in the loopy and loving context of the film, we believe in the arc.
That’s largely because Gascón sells it so persuasively. Her performance is intriguingly textured, at once hopeful and haunted. She builds an appealing and credible rapport with Saldaña, who is also terrific. Rita is one of a very few people who know who Emilia once was, which terrifies her. But she is also drawn to this wholly bettered person; she and Emilia become friends and allies, perhaps a testament to some wild cinematic version of restorative justice.
