Tag: Dominated

Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is the most fascinating movie I’ve watched in the last year, in entirely negative ways. Its 132 minutes unfold like a glittering and garish tour de force of disaster, a relentless procession of terrible ideas, terribly executed. It’s also the precise sort of preening cinematic onanism that Hollywood types like to think of as visionary, which is the reason the film’s Golden Globes triumph was just followed by a leading 13 Oscar nominations from academy voters.

Emilia Pérez is a musical set in present-day Mexico that tells the story of its titular character (played by Karla Sofía Gascón), who begins the movie as Manitas Del Monte, a murderous and terrifying drug kingpin who has recently consolidated power by annihilating competitors and buying off politicians. Despite these professional triumphs, Manitas harbors a secret desire to, in the character’s words, “be a woman,” roping the movie’s other main protagonist, attorney Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) into a plan to help her undergo a litany of gender-affirming surgeries (and I use “litany” here in its ecumenical sense—in one scene the medical names of all the various procedures are chant-sung) while also faking Manitas’ death and arranging for the erstwhile narco-trafficker’s wife (Selena Gomez) and children to be surreptitiously relocated to Switzerland. All of this somehow happens within the movie’s first 40 minutes. The remainder of the film deals with Emilia’s attempted reunion with her children (who, after four years in Switzerland, are somehow persuaded to move back in with Emilia in Mexico under the ruse that she is their deceased father’s “distant cousin”) as well as her road to personal redemption as she falls in love and founds a nonprofit dedicated to finding the remains of Mexicans who were murdered and disappeared by drug cartels, becoming a national hero in the process.

If this all sounds both ludicrous and potentially wildly offensive, you are on to something. Mexican viewers have excoriated the film’s sensationalist and deeply retrograde depiction of their country as a violence-ridden failed state, as well as Audiard’s seeming disinterest in anything resembling cultural authenticity. None of the film’s stars were born in Mexico (Gomez is third-generation Mexican American but had to learn Spanish for the role), and almost none of the movie was shot in Mexico; after making several trips there to scout locations, Audiard ultimately chose to shoot most of the film on soundstages in Paris. (The director has cited the challenges of shooting musical numbers on location as the main reason for this choice, but one also wonders if the Mexico he encountered on his scouting trips didn’t conform to the “Mexico” of his imagination.) Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ voices have criticized the film’s ham-handed depiction of gender transition, with GLAAD decrying the film as a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.” In a terrific piece for the Cut, writer Harron Walker dissected the film’s laughably obtuse depiction of medical transition while also wryly noting that “a film about a wealthy trans woman who tries to redeem her pre-transition self by founding a nonprofit that claims to help others has the potential to be hilarious, biting, and current,” a satirical possibility that utterly eludes Audiard, whose film only grows more and more humorless as it unfolds.

Were Emilia Pérez simply an abomination of content, that would be one thing. But what truly elevates the film to its rarefied plane of cinematic nonsense is that’s it’s also an abomination of form. The film’s hyperactive pursuit of the gee-whiz blurb—you’ve never seen anything like it!—has led many to describe the film as “genre-defying,” or some equivalent term. (The movie’s Netflix description uses the phrase.) But this isn’t really true: Emilia Pérez is a musical through and through, and not even a particularly innovative or original one. It has big dance numbers, it has characters bursting into song to convey their emotional truths, it has melodrama and flashy camerawork, and it has an ending that I won’t spoil (although honestly if you’ve made it this far and are still planning on watching this film, I should probably quit my job) other than to say that it is nakedly derivative of countless better works. Even the notion that its ostensibly edgy subject matter subverts its genre is silly: Musicals have been being made about serious contemporary issues for nearly as long as modern Broadway has existed. (Show Boat is almost 100 years old.)

The main reason Emilia Pérez doesn’t scan as a conventional movie musical is because, as a movie musical, it’s completely incompetent. With the exception of Gomez, no one onscreen is an observably talented vocalist, which might not have been a fatal issue if the material they were tasked with singing wasn’t so uniformly godawful. The film has no unifying musical aesthetic to speak of: Nearly every song feels like a phoned-in mashup 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 own illustrious musical traditions.) The result is a cacophonous mess without a memorable melody to speak of, let alone an even halfway decent original song.

Most successful musicals use songs to punctuate moments of emotional intensity—a great musical number creates the effect of the feeling onscreen overflowing the conventional boundaries of narrative. “Singin’ in the Rain” is great spectacle and a catchy tune, but what makes the scene and performance so indelible is the way that it brings to a head the romantic intoxication that the movie has already so carefully built. The music in Emilia Pérez doesn’t do this: The first big song-and-dance number comes less than five minutes into the film, in which Rita leads a mass chorus of impoverished and brutalized Mexicans through an ersatz Mexico City, belting out lines about the country’s “misery” while people around her are literally stabbing each other to death in the streets. It’s tawdry and cynical stuff, but it’s also just artistically inert. Rather than enhancing the film’s narrative, the music functions as a loud and gimmicky distraction from storytelling that can’t be bothered to do even the most basic work of connecting its audience to its setting and characters.

Audiard has frequently cited the influence of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy’s 1964 French New Wave masterpiece in which every line of dialogue is sung, describing it as a musical “with both a political and historical background, and maybe that’s why I made Emilia Pérez.” (Demy’s film is set against the backdrop of the Algerian War, which isn’t actually depicted in the film but is crucial to its plot.) The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is one of my favorite movies, and believe me that there’s not a single piece of music in Emilia Pérez that remotely holds a candle to Umbrellas’ main love theme, “Je Ne Pourrai Jamais Vivre Sans Toi,” the melody of which, if you’ve ever seen the movie, is probably already running through your head right now. But even more than that, much of what makes Umbrellas so affecting is the understated quotidian-ness of its story, one of young lovers thwarted first by circumstance and then the complexities of adulthood before being finally reunited in one of the great emotionally ambivalent endings in all of movies. In other words, what makes Umbrellas so singular is its wedding of fantastical formal elements (namely its musical setting and its spectacular cinematography and set designs) to a plot that’s firmly rooted in human realism. Emilia Pérez, on the other hand, weds those fantastical elements to outlandish plot contrivances and confused moral bombast, leaving us with a message movie that doesn’t even seem to know what it wants to be about.

What, exactly, is Emilia Pérez trying to say? The most generous interpretation would be that it’s a statement about the importance of self-acceptance and self-realization as pathways 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 innocuous enough until we consider that the idea that suffering from gender dysphoria somehow correlates to a propensity for serial murder is also the central conceit of The Silence of the Lambs. At one point early in 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 it all,” which feels like the closest the movie comes to a thesis statement. But it’s also a moronic sentiment, and one that carries distinctly reactionary implications. After all, the idea that what individual people choose to do with their bodies redounds to “societies” and “souls” is the driving logic behind nearly every brand of bigotry under the sun, and transphobia especially. What are we really doing here? That Emilia Pérez never even seems to ask itself this question tells you all you need to know about how little it thinks of its characters, its themes, and you.