@Courtesy of Netflix

The ability of Jacques Audiard consists of working inside the genre and at the same time trying to give his interpretation of it. Depending on the film, he decides to follow its rules or surprise the audience with a slightly different tone. His last Emilia Pérez belongs to the latter case: awarded at the last Cannes Film Festival with the prize for Best Actress – shared between the three main actresses – this movie mixes with audacity the style of a melodrama with echoes of Pedro Almodòvar with the contemporary musical.

Loosely based on a novel written by Boris Razon, the plot follows the leader of a Mexican drug cartel Manitas Del Monte who hires the attorney Rita Moro Castro to secretly help him to transition and become a woman. After a few years, Emilia Pérez enters again in Rita’s life, asking her to bring back to Mexico her wife and her children, without telling them who she really is…

From the very first scene, the viewer can easily understand that the best and most important part of Jacques Audiard’s movie is the musical side. These sequences are filled with rough, gritty energy capable of bringing the audience inside the story and making them feel the frustration of the characters. There is a sort of spontaneity in the singing and dancing that is contagious, especially because imperfect.

@Courtesy of Netflix

Audiard knows how to create and use this energy in order to elevate the tone of the screenplay. Whenever it seems the melodrama is becoming rhetoric, the director inserts a song or a dance number that fuels the movie with rhythm. The first part of Emilia Pérez, at least until the magnificent rap scene at the gala dinner, is something conceived with originality and dynamic tension.

That is not unfortunately the case for the last twenty or thirty minutes of the movie when the story and characters, especially the protagonists, become too melodramatic, letting the movie slip into the rhetoric of the genre. Too bad the ending doesn’t achieve the same level of pathos and visual courage previously experienced, otherwise it would have been something completely remarkable. 

As Audiard showed in his previous works, he is an excellent actors’ director, and Emilia Pérez is no exception. But if Selena Gomez and Karla Sofia Gascón are capable of delivering good performances, the heart and soul of the movie is without doubt Zoe Saldana. The Marvel Cinematic Universe star delivers a performance that conjugates rage, tenderness, frustration, and empathy. Her body language, almost dismissive in all the other scenes, turns into a tornado of energy when she dances and sings, developing a layered character that in the end is the one we can understand better, the one less chained to the rules of the melodrama. 

Emilia Pérez may not be the best movie directed by Jacques Audiard – it is not easy to reach the results obtained with The Prophet – but it’s hands down his most courageous, the one where he tries new ways to investigate that world of outsiders that contemporary society too easily labels as unredeemable. The French director has never been afraid to mix melodrama with crime-movie, but in this case, it doesn’t completely work in the last part of the story because it too explicitly relates to the genre. If Audiard surely showed a personal take with his last movie by adding powerful and moving musical sequences, he, unfortunately, lets the rhetoric take over in the last part of the story, where everything actually goes as any genre fan can imagine. This doesn’t ruin the result of Emilia Pérez, a new and hypnotic piece in that amazing jigsaw puzzle that is Jacques Audiard’s body of work. 

@Courtesy of Netflix

Rate: B –

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Here’s the trailer for the Emilia Pérez: