The Grand Escape of Emilia Peréz

EMILIA PERÉZ. Less is often more when it comes to foreknowledge. Take, for example, the precious little I knew about this film, the latest from revered French auteur Jacques Audiard. Even as far from the epicenter of the nerdosphere as I orbit, it has been difficult not to be at least somewhat aware of the buzz surrounding Emilia Peréz, especially after its wins at the Cannes Film Festival and selection as France’s entrant in the Best Foreign Language category at the Academy Awards.

Audiard is the type of filmmaker whose work tends to attract this kind of attention, but he has proven, over a three-decade career, that being shortlisted for prestigious awards is tertiary to the exploration of human nature in time of extremity and duress.

I knew (or thought I knew) the broad strokes and I am glad I was mistaken. Had I been told Emilia is a musical in the operatic mode, my preconceptions could very likely have been my undoing. I have made no secret of my near-universal disdain for movie musicals and I don’t intend to re-litigate my probably-foolish opinion here. Suffice to say, I’ve found that musical adaptations more often than not fail to transcend their stage-bound origins, somehow smothering the exhilaration inherent in song with close-up earnestness and overdressed choreography. There is the rare instance, though, when the musical form can be transmuted, recast as part of the greater cinematic language at a creator’s disposal in such a way that it elevates the work in which it is situated, rather than miring it in sentimentality or the traditions of another medium.

In this case, Audiard (with a great number of collaborators and contributors to the music, lyrics and choreography) has teased out a narrative arc about a character from the Boris Razon novel Écoute (2018), which I cannot say I have read. That arc — about a long-suffering, vastly wealthy sort-of industrial magnate in the midst of a major life change — draws in an underappreciated attorney from Mexico City and expands into a study of life with and without love and an examination of wealth and influence in the modern world, with frequent grace notes of violence. All of which is punctuated with raw-ly sung but impeccably produced musical numbers designed to illuminate the inner lives and far flung processes the story explores.

I’ve buried the lede here, partially in the hope of not contributing to the sensationalism of marketing and to reinforce the notion that the musicality of Emilia Peréz would or should have been a far greater stumbling block to me than any other aspect of the movie’s narrative or execution. In the briefest overviews, this is a narco story: A happily married but misgendered cartel chief (Karla Sofía Gascón), unable to continue life as it has been, enlists Rita (Zoe Saldaña), the aforementioned attorney, to put mechanisms in place to protect the chief’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two young sons, while also scouring the Earth for the best, most discreet gender-affirmation doctors and constructing a convincing fake-death scenario.

From all this emerges our titular character, a very rich woman of indeterminate origin who, rather late in life, is presented the opportunity to live with actual and complete freedom. At least that’s the hope.

Years later, Emilia and Rita are, by no accident, reunited, and Rita is again charged with a number of tasks. In addition to bringing in Jessi and the children from their luxury exile in Switzerland, she partners with Emilia to organize and operate a nonprofit organization with the mission to find and identify the tens of thousands of people disappeared as casualties of the war for control of Mexico’s vast narco economy. Simple as that sounds, it is inevitably complicated by greed and ownership and basic human need.

Drawing on musical theater back to the ancient Greeks, with more than a little Shakespeare and Great White Way for flavor, Audiard creates a beguiling, cruel, beautiful, nearly inscrutable comic tragedy from all of this. Gurneys whirl in time to choruses of “vaginoplasty, rhinoplasty” in a Bangkok surgery; Rita presents a hip-hop aria in a red velvet suit; Emilia sings softly of falling in love after spending the night with a new lover. Meanwhile severed fingers are delivered by a child bicycle courier and rich scumbags are exonerated for the obvious murders of their wives.

With consummate craft, Emilia Peréz synthesizes too many influences and elements, both structural and stylistic, into a grand but intimate portrait of complicated interior lives and of a world where immeasurable wealth grants access to all kinds of things, though it cannot necessarily undo what has or has not been done. Because the story is so singular, so specific, it somehow enables the incorporation of universal themes, the examination of conflict as global and deeply personal; it is art rendered on a giant canvas, each corner of which serves to illuminate the whole. R. 132M. NETFLIX.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.

This article appears in Flash Fiction 2024.