Anglo-progressives and US liberals might worry about whether or not certain stories are “theirs to tell”. But that’s not a scruple that worries French auteur Jacques Audiard who, with amazing boldness and sweep, launches into this slightly bizarre yet watchable musical melodrama of crime and gender, set in Mexico. It plays like a thriller by Amat Escalante with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a touch of Almodovar.
Argentinian trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon plays Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a terrifyingly powerful and ruthless cartel leader in Mexico, married to Jessi (Selena Gomez), with two young children. Manitas is intrigued by a high-profile murder trial in which an obviously guilty defendant gets off due to his smart and industrious lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana); she is nearing 40 and secretly wretched from devoting her life to protecting unrepentant slimeballs, who go on to get ever richer while she labours for pitiful fees. Manitas kidnaps Rita and makes her an offer she can’t refuse: a one-off job for an unimaginably vast amount of money on which she can retire.
The job is this: Manitas wishes to become a woman and Rita must supervise every aspect of this (which Jessi must never discover); organising the surgeon, contriving the fake death of his old self, organising new passports, securing a luxurious Swiss residence for the unsuspecting widow and fatherless kids, and setting up Manitas’s new identity … as Emilia Perez. Desperate for money and some respect, Rita agrees. And everyone keeps bursting into song! We get some very cheesy, Broadway-type choreography for the opening street scenes, rather like Miranda’s In the Heights. It takes a while to get used to, especially when Rita first talks to the grumpy Tel Aviv surgeon, accusing him of transphobia and unwilling to see that people can change and she and a lot of other people in the clinic start warbling about “sex change operations”. Gender reassignment surgery, surely?
The story really does barrel along though, and you get used to the songs. There is an entertaining, semi-intentional touch of comedy when Emilia, unable to be without the kids a moment longer, finally gets Jessi and the children back to Mexico City, telling them that she is Manitas’s cousin and they will be living with her from now on, and she will look after the children like their new favourite auntie. Emilia is a gangsta Mrs Doubtfire, or perhaps a menacing version of David Cross’s trillingly-voiced nanny Mrs Featherbottom in TV’s Arrested Development. And the theme of change does not stop there. Emilia becomes overwhelmed with remorse at the thousands of young people “disappeared” by the cartels in Mexico and becomes celebrated and beatified for setting up an NGO charity to find the graves and give the grieving parents closure. But an awful reckoning is on its way.
It seems pointless to complain about plot implausibility with something like this, but once Rita has left Emilia’s employ, then somebody else must surely have the job of secretly organising everything in Emilia’s new existence, and this person must therefore be very important in the new clandestine organisation that facilitates Emilia Perez’s new life as a very wealthy woman. But we don’t get to find out about it. Audiard brings his usual ambition and sweep, energy and attack; although I wondered at certain points if the musical numbers functioned at some level as an alibi, to pre-empt objections about being the film being contrived. Gascon, though, carries it off with queenly flair.
• Emilia Perez screened at the Cannes film festival.
