This musical drama about a Mexican cartel leader who finally embraces the woman he always was, starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, took the Cannes Film Festival by surprise.
Jacques Audiard is a regular at the Croisette. The French director has already won three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival: a Palme d’Or (Dheepan2015), the Grand Jury Prize (a prophet2009) and the Best Screenplay Award (A very discreet hero, 1996). For his return to the Croisette, the filmmaker chose to take all the risks with a completely new project. And the worst part is that it works. Emilia Perez is a (mostly) Spanish-language musical drama that mixes the Mexican cartel with trans identity. Yes yes, you read correctly. In details, Emilia Perez follows a lawyer in the midst of an existential crisis who is entrusted with a mission by a formidable Mexican gang leader: to help him disappear and finally become the woman he always was deep down.
Story of atonement and second chances, Emilia Perez is very surprising, but the cocktail, as explosive and disconcerting as it is, manages to take hold. Thanks to virtuoso direction and superb photography, Jacques Audiard films the repentance of a gang leader, her liberation through her transidentity, and the evils that tear Mexican society apart, with drug traffickers and corruption at the forefront. In the middle, there are opposing journeys of women which complement and respond to each other until an astonishing finale. The heroine played by Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón (herself a transgender woman) is flamboyant in all the nuances of her inner tension, while Zoe Saldana is remarkable in the face of a Selena Gomez astonishing, which finally shows that well directed, it can create sparks.
Far from the standards of Broadway musicals, composers Clément Ducol and Camille create a powerful soundtrack to make the innermost parts of their characters dance on screen. Emilia Perez is however not free from faults, the sung parts are sometimes quite weak and do not echo the power of the mixture of voices or the moment, the plot or certain dialogues do not always take, but we are ready to forgive these imperfections in the face of the pleasure that viewing provides.
With Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard could add an award to his shelves and signs one of the first big surprises of the Cannes Film Festival. Perhaps not a Palme d’Or, since Bird by Andrea Arnold conquered the press as expected, or that Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos also stands out, but a directing prize does not seem unattainable, at least at this stage of the competition. We must now wait until the end of the competition on May 25 to find out if the jury is of the same opinion.
Synopsis – Overqualified and overexploited, Rita uses her talents as a lawyer in the service of a large firm more inclined to launder criminals than to serve justice. But an unexpected exit door opens to her, helping the cartel leader Manitas to get out of business and carry out the plan he has been secretly refining for years: finally becoming the woman he always dreamed of being. .