‘Emilia Pérez’: Your Oscar-Contending Drug-Cartel Sex-Change Musical

A woozy doozy of a genre-busting musical, the bold and breathtaking Emilia Pérez swings for the fences with a lusty bluster. Imagine an award-winning French filmmaker making a Mexican telenovela about a murderous cartel drug lord who wants a sex change operation—and then add song-and-dance numbers with rat-a-tat rap-banter wordplay. Chorines in hospital gowns singing about vaginoplasty? In-house counsel for a non-profit charity table-dancing her contempt for corrupt politicians? It’s the recipe for a colossal folly. And yet—beguilingly, preposterously, touchingly—this live-out-loud concoction works.

EMILIA PEREZ ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Jacques Audiard
Written by: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, Edgar Ramírez
Running time: 132 mins

Zoe Saldaña plays Rita Mora Castro, a whip-smart junior lawyer whose shady boss forces her to help acquit crooks. She wants out, and an anonymous phone call offers the way. It also means being kidnapped on the street, thrown into a van, and forced to meet with one of the country’s most dangerous men, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón). Manitas wants a different kind of escape: to hit the reset button, shed his affluent life of violence, and stat over as a fabulously wealthy woman of leisure.  

Only problem is that Manitas is a family man, and he needs to make sure his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two sons are completely safe, with new identities in a new country. He asks Rita to set it all up for him: the best sex-change operation in the world, Swiss bank accounts for Jessi, forged passports for everyone. And, in return, Rita gets to transform her own life. 

Four years later, Jessi and her boys are nestled in a lakeside Lausanne manor, Manitas’ violent death—staged, of course—is public record, and Rita is a cosmopolitan attorney who hobnobs at dinner parties in London. Until one night she sits down near a mystery guest: socialite Emilia Pérez, who Rita chillingly realizes used to be Manitas. And this time, Emilia needs another favor from Rita. She wants her kids back. What could go wrong?

A lot, it turns out. Emilia pretends to be Manitas’ long lost cousin and reunites with Jessi and her boys under false pretenses. But her love for that family, and the secret transformation she can never reveal to Jessi, eventually collides with Jessi’s own pining for a past flame named Gustavo (Edgar Ramírez). And Auntie Emi does not approve. 

Had enough plot twists yet? There are even more, including Emilia making amends to the families of so many thousands of people “disappeared” in the drug-related violence of his nefarious drug cartel machinations. Not to mention her romance with a widow named Epifánia (Adriana Paz). And in a world plagued with so much suffering and desperate for any kind of happy ending, no one gets out unscathed.

Expressionistic humanist Jacques Audiard has forged a career telling outlandish tales where characters find love in unexpected places. His 2001 film Read My Lips is a crime romance between a thug and a deaf office co-worker. In 2012’s Rust and Bone, a burly bouncer falls for a double-amputee Orca trainer. These are set-ups to jokes, not the loglines for affecting dramas. But everything always clicks in the most surprising ways.

He’s also a politically attuned internationalist. His brilliant 2009 Arabic Scarface prison drama A Prophet follows a young Algerian thug who rises in the ranks of the Corsican mob, methodically consolidating his growing power. And Dheepan, which won him the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2015, chronicles a war-weary Tamil Tiger who emigrates from Sri Lanka to Paris with his family, only to find himself in the crossfire of drug dealers. 

With Emilia Perez, he tells a story that fuses transgender rights with the lingering societal repercussions of Mexico’s deadly drug trade. And then sets it all to song. Wait, what? Audiard sees his story’s operatic potential, right down to its inevitable tragic dimensions, and runs with it. Very few writer-directors have the self-assurance—let alone the gonzo guts—to trust their wild visions and commit to them completely.

His most empathetic decision was to make this a musical, and enlist French chanteuse Camille and partner Clément Ducol to whip up such frothy numbers that reveal such foundational anguish. In almost every song a character is yearning—for trans right, for liberation from a macho dominated world, for the right to love simply and freely. Or, in the case of one of the sons, for the father that suddenly vanished. “You smell like papa—tequila and guacamole, leather and cigars,” one of them sings to Emilia when she’s putting him to bed. It beautifully distills absolute heartache so  in the most unlikely moment. The pain is rapturous.