During the first full week of The 62nd
New York Film Festival, I attended a screening of the new musical crime
drama “Emilia Pérez”,
starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez.
Synopsis
When a drug dealer wants to retire and have a sex change
operation, can the lawyer he hires help him?
Rita (Saldaña) is an overworked and underappreciated lawyer
working in Mexico. Dissatisfied with her
job, a new opportunity is unexpectedly presented to her – a cartel operator
offers her quite a sum of money to help him get out of the business once and
for all. In fact, not only does he want
to retire, he also wants to undergo gender reassignment surgery so that he will
be untraceable to his nemeses.
Ultimately, Rita takes the offer; she quits her job and has the cartel
boss as her only client. She is now
tasked with trying to find a surgeon who can not only perform the job
successfully, but also can be relied upon to keep it quiet.
Once the operation is completed, the cartel boss decides to
go by the name of Emilia Pérez. With her
past business having financially set her up for life, she no longer needs to
work. By now, having completed her
assignment, Rita is living the good life; she decides to treat herself by
taking a trip to London, where she has a chance meeting with her former client Emilia. Emilia’s former wife Jessi (Gomez) was given
to understand that her husband was dead and she would have to raise their
children by herself. Emilia tells Rita
that she now misses her children and wants them and Jessi to live with them; Rita
is now hired by her with a new mission.
After Rita intercedes on Emilia’s behalf, Jessi and their
children go to stay with her; Emilia tells the children that she is an aunt
they haven’t previously met. Everything
seems to be working out well until Jessi decides that she wants to move out to
live with her new boyfriend – the problem being that she intends to take her
children with them. Emilia is suspicious
of Jessi’s boyfriend and believes that Jessi is merely being selfish and may not
be taking the best interests of their children into consideration. Rita is once again involved in the situation –
but once she learns that Emilia and the children may be endangered, can she
rescue them?
“Emilia Pérez” seems to be a motion picture that’s targeted
towards young people, especially those that fall into the Hispanic
demographic. They say that youth must be
served; if that’s true, then they are more than welcome to be served my
portion. The film contains an operetta replete
with libretto but also has something of the look and feel of a telenovela. Given the fact that this is such a wild
storyline, perhaps this should be expected.
The ending requires something of a suspension of disbelief, but with
this kind of tale, maybe you could say the same thing about the entire
movie.
The film checks off almost all of the requirements for DEI
compliance: a French director with an
Hispanic cast and story about a transexual former drug lord. Yahtzee!
An argument could also be made that it passes The Bechdel test as the
lead character doesn’t have any romantic relationship and the movie focuses on
female characters. Technically speaking,
the motion picture suffers by way of its subtitling as all of it is in white,
which makes it hard to read on light-colored backgrounds (of which there are
many); instead, the color yellow would have been a major improvement as it is
readable against all colored backgrounds (except yellow itself, obviously,
which is rare).
Following the screening, there was an interview with
director Jacques Audiard and some of the cast.
The director stated that it took him four years to get the film made; it
was adapted from a novel and he chose to focus on a single character from the
book. Zoe Saldana said she found
elements of herself in the character she played, including the dancing as she
had previously studied ballet. One of
the things that appealed to her about the script was that it was about women
looking to find some form of freedom in their own way. Also, she found that the story showed mercy
for characters that are ultimately unredeemable.
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