YOU MAY NOT BELIEVE EMILIA PEREZ BUT YOU WILL BELIEVE ITS FILM MAGIC

Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Perez

By Dominique Paul Noth

In January on a hunch I used my Netflix account to check out Emilia Perez, which at that point had gotten 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. It’s still a hard sell but bear with me.

I was  happy to see it on the Oscar list of best films and even more pleased that its openly trans actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, is rightly nominated for best actress.

I doubt if Oscar voters will have the strength to throw aside 90 years of tradition and vote a transvestite as best actress – not actor – though the ascendance of Trump may give voters enough rebellious instinct to do so. 

 But it is a phenomenal acting job, though I don’t think the 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 more soft-hearted lovable aunt of her own children and female confidante of her one-time wife.

Gascon as Manitas

It is an extraordinary thrust of an idea that makes no sense given what we know about machismo Mexican drug lords. It ends up as a philosophical debate for the audience. But this is the power of film visionaries who can take us on a ride of vivid imagination that is hard to justify when we return to the real world.

Even more remarkable, French director Jacques Audiard (who films almost entirely in Europe) initially conceived as Emilia Perez as a modernized opera.  The characters sing their feelings in group numbers interwoven with strong dialog acting. The mere juxtaposition of such diverse characters carries its own fascination.  Who will discover the real Emilia Perez or is his transition into a her 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 Saldano (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 see it, it almost makes sense in opera terms – we just have a problem accepting  “La Traviata “ 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 Saldano  -- 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.

There is a message here from the director 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.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic as well as editor in charge of its arts and entertainment staff. 

He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives still at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly. 

A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.