EMILIA PÉREZ *1/2
Jacques Audiard2024
IDEA: A transgender drug cartel leader in Mexico enlists the help of a lawyer to procure her a sex-change operation.
BLURB: You’d be hard-pressed to accuse Emilia Pérez of lacking audacity. It takes daring to make a musical-comedy thriller set against the backdrop of drug cartel violence in Mexico, centering a transgender cartel leader who elects to have a sex-change operation to live as her true self. It’s an act of nerve, especially, if you’re a cisgender Frenchman at the helm. Daring, though, is a hair’s breadth away from reckless folly, which Emilia Pérez more often looks (and sounds) like than not. Here, Audiard’s grittily flamboyant expressionism is utterly misapplied to the social-realist nature of the subject matter. This was at times a liability in the director’s Dheepan, but then that film wasn’t a woolly rock opera careening gauchely between songs about “vaginoplasties” and sepulchral laments to Mexico’s epidemic of enforced disappearances. Emilia Pérez never finds a way to reconcile its overstuffed ideas or disparate tones, or to even fashion a compelling narrative around people who should be a whole lot more complex, performed by actors who do mostly heroic work with erratic or barely-there characterizations. For a musical, it’s inexcusably lead-footed, marked by lurching rhythms and awkward fadeouts that exacerbate the lethargy of much of the singing. Why did Audiard want to tell this story? What is his interest in touring this land and people he seems glibly invested in at best, while perpetuating a hoary narrative of trans martyrdom? The film grasps for sociopolitical import, but drowns in a pell-mell of tacky, confused sensationalism.
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