Emilia Pérez – REVIEW

Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoë Saldaña in Emilia Pérez

Movies with ambition are always something to appreciate. It’s a very vague sentence, but I can’t be the only one with that sentiment. A project like Emilia Pérez, at least on paper, is also something we don’t come across too often. The film is based on writer/director Jacques Audiard’s opera of the same name, which in turn is based on a novel by Boris Razon titled Écoute. The movie spread like wildfire with its premiere at Cannes last May, where its main actresses took him the Jury Prize for Best Actress, those performers being Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz. That goes without saying what the actual movie is: a crime/thriller/comedy/musical about a feared Mexican cartel leader that hires a lawyer to help him disappear while attaining his dream of transitioning into a woman. The highlights here easily have to be Saldaña and Gascón, making the movie not only watchable but enjoyable whenever they’re on screen, both together and separate. The music is admittedly very in one ear, out the other, but I did enjoy “El Mal” quite a bit. Both Gomez and Paz just didn’t do anything for me. They weren’t bad at all, but I wasn’t blown away at all. However, there’s a big thing that stops me here: We don’t know anything about Gascón’s character, the titular Emilia Pérez. She isn’t even the main character. I’m not trans, so I can’t speak to how someone thinks if they realize they’re transgender, but maybe we should have learned something, anything really, about what Emilia wanted pre-transition. There are moments where it seems like Emilia was transitioning specifically to run from her past as a cartel leader because it seemed like a good plan, not because that’s how she was feeling. Emilia Pérez so badly wants brownie points, but in the process, it completely fumbles in making its title character interesting. It’s a pretty damning blow to a seemingly well-intentioned movie, and one that practically ruins any goodwill to the filmmakers. It’s destined to become an Oscar frontrunner at this point, with Gascón likely to be the first transgender actress nominated ever. It’s a shame that it has to be for this movie.


Ryan’s Grade: C-