Emilia Pérez commands attention. It’s a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars, a florid Spanish-language musical by French auteur Jacques Audiard in which a besuited Zoe Saldaña, spot lit, charges around a charity dinner. She crawls over tables, straddles the monied elite and pulls at their neckties. It’s a fantasy sequence, an expression of her revulsion towards the hypocrisy in the room. The diners are there to honour the missing and murdered of Mexico, the victims of the cartels, all while pocketing bribes and offering favours to those responsible. “All these people talk,” she hisses. “Now they’re going to pay.”
Audiard tends towards that kind of direct, intense sentiment in his films – whether it’s the sudden shocks of violence that erupt in the French prison of A Prophet (2009), or Marion Cotillard as a whale trainer recovering from a double leg amputation in Rust and Bone (2012), retracing the movements of her show routine set to Katy Perry’s “Firework”. But Audiard’s efforts don’t always pay off, and in Emilia Pérez they come across as impassioned but featherweight.
