‘Emilia Perez’ Is a Must See

Zoe Saldana speaking at the 2016 San Diego Comic Con International. Photo by Gage Skidmore. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It was on a hunch that I used my Netflix account to check out Emilia Perez, which at that point had received some of the oddest film reviews in my memory.

I’m glad I did and can now recommend it as one of the most provocative and different movies of 2024, truly a visionary attempt worth thinking about. I do have some reservations, but was happy to see it on the Oscar list of best films and even more pleased that Karla Sofía Gascón, who came out as a trans woman in 2016, is rightly nominated for best actress.

It is a phenomenal acting job — though I don’t think the on camera transition is completely believable. From an acting standpoint, she has to sing in two vocal ranges and be a frightening gold-tooth threat (the Marlon Brando voice) before she becomes Emilia Perez, the soft-hearted lovable aunt of her own children and female confidante of her one-time wife.

Even more remarkable, French director Jacques Audiard (who filmed it almost entirely in Europe) initially conceived of Emilia Perez as a modernized opera. The characters sing their feelings in group numbers interwoven with strong dialogue acting. The mere juxtaposition of such diverse characters carries its own fascination. Who will discover the real Emilia Perez or does their transition carry enough justification for the changes the character goes through?

The story unfolds not just in song, but in sinewy dance numbers and nimble camera work, so intensive and successful that Audiard does have a legitimate chance of winning the best director Oscar. The music is hardly hummable, but it is transfixing in its rhythms and thrusts.

With his command of camera, acting movement, editing and musical insight, Audiard has more in common with Fellini and Bunuel than with Spielberg or Scorsese.

The plot revolves initially around Zoe Saldana (nominated as best supporting actress for a role that actually carries much of the film). She portrays a smart Mexican lawyer who sings her dismay at the way the court system works and then agrees with great fear and threats to her life to represent Manitas, the most ferocious drug lord the Mexican cartels had ever seen.

He wants to disappear and come back as a woman. (Yup, the story is hard to believe, but it almost makes sense in opera terms – we just have a problem accepting La Traviata-style agonies in a modernistic drug-murdering way.)

How his money and authority can survive when he convinces authorities he is dead and returns as a woman – well, no wonder the legions of victims of Mexican drug cartels find the whole idea hard to accept. And yet, for much of the hypnotic movie, we go along. We even cheer for Emilia’s desire to rescue families torn about by the drug wars.

After years of surgery and domestic transformation from a frighteningly macho drug lord into a smiling Emilia Perez, the story returns to Saldana — the only character who knows who Emilia really is. Now as a friend, she concocts a new life disguising the past from Manitas’ wife and children.

The wife is played and sung by Selena Gomez (who strangely is not Oscar nominated for anything, yet is well known to audiences for things like the TV series “Only Murders in the Building”). She is restless without a man, not recognizing the roots of Emilia. She rekindles an illicit affair — and suddenly Emilia, who has led efforts to reunite families who lost children to the drug cartels he once ran, reverts to Manitas rage, threatening as a rich aunt to take the children. His wife turns as nasty and limb-chopping as he once did and the story enters into truly operatic-size bloody tragedy.

Actress Gascón almost brings off this remarkable transformation – I would argue that almost anything an actor could do she employs, first to scare us as the ferocious Mexican drug lord and then melt after a sex change into the lovable aunt who tries to help those hurt by drug lords. But will this be enough for Oscar voters? The concept is not wholly realized, but few of her competitors faced such challenges. And Gascon is now facing a storm of criticism for past derogatory comments about Muslims, George Floyd and China.

The movie offers a message that carries us along through a story difficult to accept on a realistic level but always fascinating on a humanistic level. I don’t know how far its grip will extend to receiving Oscar honors. But those who understand what Emilia Perez is attempting will find it a film living in memory deeper than mere realism could ever allow.