Emilia Pérez is a misguided musical mess

There appears to be only one person in the musical Emilia Pérez who knows the kind of inconsistent movie they’re making. 

That would not be Zoe Saldaña, here playing Rita Moro Castro: a disaffected defence lawyer who starts off criticizing Mexico’s corrupt justice system and ends up jamming a man’s face into the crotch of her red velvet pantsuit.

It would not be Selena Gomez’s Jessi — the platinum-haired moll of a notorious drug lord, who ping-pongs between domestic distress and singing to her cellphone camera in a never explained or explored subplot about social media obsession. 

And it is not the various bit parts scattered throughout. At times they tack serious, delivering heart-rending laments on the piles of unidentified human remains littering the Mexican landscape, innocent victims of the country’s unending drug wars. At others, they dance through operating rooms with goofily unnerving smiles plastered on their faces, chanting: “Penis to vagina, or vagina to penis: what will it be?”

Instead, the only character somewhat granted the gift of consistency is the one who also goes through the most obvious change: Emilia herself. Played by actress Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia is expectedly the heart and soul of the movie, and handles even the more ridiculous aspects — of which there is absolutely no shortage — with a serious consideration that emotionally grounds the story. At least, when it focuses on her. 

WATCH | Emilia Perez trailer:

That’s true even if the plot sounds like something of a fever dream. Prior to transitioning, Emilia is that notorious drug lord married to Jessica — a growling voice on the phone that hires Rita to track down the clinics, doctors and recovery spaces that will allow her to become the person she’s always wanted to be.

The only problem is the family she’ll have to leave behind — the wife and young children who are told nothing about any of these plans. Instead, Rita sets them up in a fancy Swiss mansion, helping them weather the media and political storm at home — after Emilia fakes her own death and goes on to live a new, secret life. That is, until she changes her mind four years later, re-employs Rita to bring her family back to Mexico, and poses as her own estranged cousin to force her way back into her sons’ lives. 

But as convoluted as that sounds, that particular storyline takes up less than half of the 130-minute runtime. The rest is stuffed with the random side quests that define Emilia Pérez, crafting the meandering telenovela-style it’s often compared to, which works much better in a long-running TV format than film. 

Instead of the decades-long soap operas have to flesh out and follow every random character within eyesight, Emilia Pérez works more like a story told by a precocious, if deeply disturbed, toddler. Because after establishing itself as a crime drama about a trans woman, it seems to just… kind of forget the point of the story it was telling. 

Freewheeling car crash

While flipping perspective unpredictably, it drifts into a critique of the Mexican justice system (directed and written by a Frenchman, Jacques Audiard, and adapted from the French novel Écoute). It then moves to the redemption story of the murdering drug kingpin (who barely addresses her crimes) and finally dives into a completely unearned and unresolved love story because, hey, we’re already here. Why not? 

But the freewheeling nature of Emilia Pérez is perhaps at its worst when it comes to its genre mixing. It is at times a cringe-ingly self-serious procedure — the We Are the World sequence featuring disembodied children’s heads singing about gang warfare is particularly difficult to stomach. At others, Pérez seems to want to make a joke of the whole scenario, as if throwing in stage makeup, street jazz and performative campiness is required on the entrance exam to even qualify as a musical.

That seriously undercuts what is otherwise seemingly intended to be a weighty examination of the trans experience. And while Gascón, a trans woman herself, is able to set up that perspective early on, the jokey gags and irreverent tone at best alienate the audience, and at worst alienate Gascón’s character. For example, when Rita and a surgeon use a drippingly maudlin ballad to argue whether a sex change operation would change the “man” inside — an argument that happens while Emilia isn’t even in the room. 

Pérez crams everything in, causing it to collapse under the weight of its own ambitions. It’s like if Tommy Wiseau’s The Room was somehow also a musical, while simultaneously finding a way to be boring.

That’s not to slight the performances. Alongside Gascón, Gomez and Saldaña’s acting and singing are impressive, if not all of their choices. What’s unfortunate is Emilia Pérez fell to the same live-recording allure virtually every movie musical since Les Misérables has — the gimmicky headline-bait of recording the actors’ songs live instead of pre-recording them in a studio. 

Like in Dear Evan Hansen, Cats, Joker: Folie à Deux and the upcoming Wicked, it’s a braggadocios choice that does literally nothing to improve the quality — while often harming the final orchestration, timing and sense of immersion the movie musical has to offer. 

Here, we get breathy, acting-first performances that, however satisfactory, would have been universally improved by a studio recording treatment. The only benefit could be an increased sense of realism, hopefully tricking the “I hate musicals” crowd to buy a ticket. Though watering down a genre’s best aspects to appeal to people inherently opposed to it is not often a recipe for success.

Unsurprisingly, that is very much the case here and, as a depressing commentary on the state of Hollywood musicals, leads to a potential Oscars frontrunner that somehow boasts fewer catchy songs than Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Musical.