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.

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