“Emilia Pérez,” the latest film from celebrated French director Jacques Audiard (“Rust & Bone”), and opening today on Netflix, is a unicorn. Though its various antecedents are legion—at various points during this tumultuous, uncategorizable film, I thought of Pedro Almodovar, Jacques Demy, Douglas Sirk, Martin Scorsese, Bollywood and camp—it ultimately transcends the sum of its parts, subverting the math itself.
The movie’s very premise is bonkers, and requires its viewers to suspend their disbelief and just go with it. Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana) is a junior defense lawyer stuck in a dead-end job helping to acquit obvious criminals of their crimes. An opportunity arrives in the form of a mysterious phone call from a gruff-voiced individual offering her unseen riches if she meets him at a newsstand in 10 minutes.
She complies, only to be kidnapped, with a garbage bag over her head, and tossed into the backseat of a van. She’s then driven to an undisclosed location, where she meets the man who called her: fearsome cartel leader Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon), who has been admiring Rita’s legal maneuverings from a distance, and who would like to employ her services.
But Rita is not some Saul Goodman striking a Faustian bargain with a drug kingpin. Juan’s request is a bit more heterodox than all that. He wants Rita to assist him in his sex change operation by traveling the world to find the right doctor so that this cis male may finally become her true self. Oh, and did I mention the movie is a musical?
In Audiard’s eccentric hands, all of this feels like prologue. So do the operation itself, which barely consumes any screen time, and the hasty plot to fake “Juan’s” death at the hands of a rival cartel, all so that her new identity, as Emilia Pérez, can provide cover for abandoning Juan’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two children, albeit in the arranged comfort of a Swiss chateaux.
The bulk of “Emilia Pérez,” and certainly its most interesting parts, occur after the 40-minute mark, set four years later, at a not-so-chance meeting in London between Emilia and Rita. This time, the former kingpin, all but unrecognizable as an elegant trans woman, is seeking a new service from her former counsel: Find a way to reunite her with her children.
As the title character attempts to patch up the relationship with her exiled family and reckon with the hundreds of thousands of people who were “disappeared” under Juan’s drug- and human-trafficking regime, “Emilia Pérez” throbs with the dichotomies of its title character’s life—between the past and present, between male and female, and between the secrets and lies required to bridge these gaps. In presenting the difficulties of absolution from sins, the film powerfully reiterates the old William Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
With themes like these, “Emilia Pérez” would have been powerfully told as a straight crime drama. The musical interludes (Audiard adapted the movie from his own opera libretto of the same name) result in an odder, more eccentric and often more affecting cinematic experience. Rita’s visit to Bangkok to attempt to enlist a Thai doctor to perform Emilia’s sex-change operation is a choreographic marvel of whirling stretchers and medical equipment worthy of Busby Berkeley, while the film’s emotional apex is a duet of sweetness and vulnerability, as Emilia’s youngest son smells his “late” father’s scent on Emilia.
Mind you, not all of Audiard’s choices work. There’s a clunkiness to some of the dialogue and the old-fashioned fades-to-black. They feel like intentional echoes to the florid melodramas of the 1950s, but they can fall flat amid the film’s edgy contemporary context.
But when “Emilia Pérez” is firing on all cylinders, it’s not hard to set picayune reservations aside. This is a richer and more rewarding film than it originally appears, complete with a tragically Shakespearean sweep. With a film this blazingly unique, there’s no surprise it was selected as the French entry for Best International Feature at next year’s Academy Awards. I expect it to be a contender.
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