Well this is unexpected. Veteran French director Jacques Audiard takes arguably the biggest gamble of his career with the eccentric, genre-bending, Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez. Set in Mexico, it deals with female empowerment, cartel violence and the epidemic levels of disappearances in the country, as well as gender reassignment surgery and transitioning – all explored with endearingly shoddy song and dance numbers. It’s a startling departure for Audiard, but in some ways it’s also a consolidation of themes of reinvention that he has been exploring on and off throughout his career.
His 1996 breakthrough picture, A Self-Made Hero, followed an impostor protagonist who fraudulently claimed to have been a hero of the French resistance. A Prophet (2009) starred Tahar Rahim, who begins the film as a friendless teenage delinquent out of his depth in an adult prison and ends it as a kingpin in organised crime. More recently there was Dheepan (2015), the story of a former Tamil Tiger who adopts a new persona as a family man claiming asylum in France.
