Emil­ia Pérez review – a musi­cal that bare­ly wants to be a musical

In Jacques Audiard’s mys­te­ri­ous­ly laud­ed new musi­cal­dra­ma, a car­tel boss (Kar­la Sofía Gascón) hires lawyer Rita (Zoe Sal­daña) to help her fake her death and tran­si­tion from ​“Man­i­tas” into Emil­ia Pérez. Years lat­er, she tries to nav­i­gate car­ing for her ex-wife (Sele­na Gomez), who believes Man­i­tas is dead, and start­ing an organ­i­sa­tion to help those whose loved ones have been kid­napped or mur­dered by car­tels in Mexico.

Audi­ard ignores the dilem­mas faced by its title char­ac­ter, who has mur­dered and kid­napped hun­dreds or thou­sands of peo­ple for her own ben­e­fit and is now try­ing to make amends for her past. The musi­cal num­bers are flac­cid, and bare­ly present, instead punc­tu­at­ing the script’s most idi­ot­ic beats when­ev­er it remem­bers to weave them in. There’s no struc­tur­al con­sis­ten­cy to their musi­cal­i­ty or pre­sen­ta­tion, their arrange­ments occa­sion­al­ly sound­ing like rip offs from Leos Carax’s Annette, and often accom­pa­nied by Damien Jalet’s lack­lus­tre choreography.

That it was based on an idea Audi­ard got from a chap­ter in Boris Razon’s nov­el, ​‘Écoute’, and hap­haz­ard­ly adapt­ed that into a musi­cal is no shock. Even in try­ing to adapt the nov­el chapter’s rel­a­tive insen­si­tiv­i­ty – in which the drug trafficker’s tran­si­tion is prompt­ed exclu­sive­ly by a long­ing to escape and does so by mould­ing them­selves into their ​“first love” – by ensur­ing that the audi­ence knows that wom­an­hood has been Emilia’s dream all along, Audi­ard can’t escape trans­pho­bic tropes and gen­der essentialism.

In their very first scene togeth­er, Rita lit­er­al­ly gasps with dis­gust at Emil­ia (in boy-mode drag as Man­i­tas) open­ing her shirt to ​“prove” she’s seri­ous about tran­si­tion­ing. Though the audi­ence, bless­ed­ly, isn’t shown the small breasts she’s pre­sum­ably grown with two years of hor­mones, the reac­tion shot alone being played like a body hor­ror reveal is enough.

The film’s regres­sive pol­i­tics are every­where, not just in the way Emilia’s tran­si­tion is pre­sent­ed (com­plete with a ​“woman stares at her new vagi­na through a pock­et mir­ror” shot that baf­fling­ly comes while Emil­ia is still ban­daged from head to toe after surgery). Any time Emil­ia ​“reverts” to her ​“old ways”, Gas­con low­ers her vocal reg­is­ter as if to equate mas­culin­i­ty with evil and fem­i­nin­i­ty with good. Men may be no more than props, but no woman’s nar­ra­tive arc is remote­ly well-devel­oped, Audi­ard shrug­ging aside any attempt at flesh­ing them out, hav­ing them bland­ly deliv­er their lines (with poor Gomez unable to fin­ish some of them in her in-film native lan­guage of Span­ish) until they are dis­posed of.

Its most laugh­able moments, includ­ing a song set in Bangkok where Thai nurs­es and doc­tors sing about the myr­i­ad surg­eries that can accom­pa­ny med­ical tran­si­tion, clear­ly believe they’re play­ing in the same field of camp as Pedro Almod­ó­var, but they’re all accom­pa­nied by an exhaust­ing self-seri­ous­ness. Even if it wasn’t a regres­sive pic­ture mas­querad­ing as pro­gres­sive, or com­plete­ly out-of-touch with the sociopo­lit­i­cal real­i­ty of Mex­i­co, Emil­ia Pérez would sim­ply be a bor­ing one and that’s just as much a crime.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.