‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Jacques Audiard’s Melo-Noir Musical Makes It Up As It Goes Along

Early in Emilia Pérez, Zoe Saldaña’s frustrated attorney, Rita, is seen working on trial documents ahead of defending a man who likely pushed his wife off their balcony. After printing her documents at an outdoor food market inexplicably equipped with a printer, you almost expect her to turn to the camera and say what we can glean from the words on her computer screen: that this will be a film about violence. Instead, she sings. Because why not?

As Rita stands up, she slips into fantasy, and as she starts dancing down a crowded Mexico City street, arms akimbo, Jacques Audiard’s film immediately announces that it will make everything, earnestly and sloppily, as plain as possible through Clément Ducol and Camille’s songs. Before the film has really kicked into motion, it’s already established that it will do little with any particular panache, but gosh darn it, it will be entirely well meaning as it does so.

This is familiar terrain for Audiard, who isn’t so much a melodramatist as a sentimentalist. Emilia Pérez straddles multiple genres, but it’s largely a melo-noir about how Rita falls into the orbit of a powerful cartel leader, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), and agrees to help him fake his death, then medically transition and be reborn as Emilia Pérez. Rita also helps Emilia’s wife/widow, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and two sons escape Mexico to Switzerland, after which Emilia and Rita’s working relationship would appear to be over. That is, until a not-so-chance encounter in London leads Emilia to enlist Rita’s services again—this time to get Jessi and her boys to return to Mexico and live with Manitas’s cousin…Emilia Pérez.

That’s enough material for multiple seasons of your average telenovela, but there’s more. As Emilia’s life has been re-enriched by the presence of her family, she decides to dedicate her time and wealth to starting a nonprofit organization whose focus is on locating the missing victims of cartel violence. And as Emilia falls increasingly in love with one of the women, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), who comes to the foundation, seeking out information about her missing abusive boyfriend, Jessi sings about being manacled in golden handcuffs, while at the same time pining for the man, Gustavo Brun (Edgar Ramírez), with whom she cheated on Manitas.

Emilia Pérez was originally intended to be an opera, which perhaps partly explains its saccharine sentimentality, repetitive lyrics, and diverging story branches. But that doesn’t excuse its almost random, whiplash-inducing tonal pivots. The film also seldom commits to a point of view or idea, be it about systematic and gendered violence in Mexico, the struggles of being trans, the corruption of the government, or the struggles of being a woman in the nonprofit sector. Emilia Pérez tries to be a lot of things, only to end up being about very little.

The premise of “what if a drug lord came out as a transwoman?” hints at a little bit of fun, maybe even transgressiveness, but Audiard has opted for something much more serious and high-minded. Indeed, even the most bombastic moments get dragged down by a tone of teacherly condescension. The best noirs key their aesthetics to the psychosexual impulses of their characters, but just as its style is enervating, Emilia Pérez settles for mundane portraiture.

For one, the film heavily implies that Emilia’s womanhood has granted her a sense of empathy that she was previously lacking when she was existing as a barbaric and violent man, but it never really digs into that. Sofía Gascón hints at a more complex character, one who’s forever riding the waves of violence and tenderness, but Audiard mostly just sees her as a reformed sinner.

Not even Gomez can enliven the film. If there’s no poignancy to her singing of her gilded entrapment, it’s because the depth of her being is gated from us. Though we catch a glimpse early on of her relationship with Manitas, Jessi remains a cliché: the under-loved spouse of a very important person who of course had an affair. There’s a certain absurdity to Jessi never suspecting that Emilia is her former husband, making it easy to imagine the more, well, imaginative film that would have used the idea of Emilia seeming both familiar and totally unknown to Jessi as an occasion to knowingly fling itself into a realm of the farcical.

There’s a welcome outlandishness to one set piece in Emilia Pérez, when Rita visits a Philippines clinic that performs gender confirmation surgeries and the surgeons and patients launch into Busby Berkeley-style syncopated movements, but little here justifies itself as a musical. There’s no truly great set piece, and barely a good song. The film is surefooted about all of its decisions, even as its steps don’t follow any particularly discernible path. If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.