[ad_1]
There’s so much going on in filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s adventure musical/melodrama/crime-thriller “Emilia Pérez,” it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer ambition of it all.
There is clear craftsmanship and moments of true excellence, beauty and horror. Set around Mexico City, it is a film about family, ambition, the possibility of change, cartels, human disappearances, gender-affirmation, money and corruption.
Sometimes the characters break into imaginary musical numbers: some filled with anger, others with joy and hope. At other times the songs come out barely above a whisper. And yet despite all that life, color and passion on screen, there’s a glaring rift between all the big emotions the characters are going through and what the audience is feeling, which is practically nothing. It’s almost as if “Emilia Pérez” forgot to invite us for a visit.
And it’s quite exciting: one day a cartel boss named Manitas kidnaps Rita Mora Castro, a smart, but undervalued lawyer. Manitas wants gender confirmation surgery, and Rita has to handle the logistics: hiring the discreet surgeon, faking Manitas’s death, and getting the wife, Jesse, and two children to their new home in Switzerland. In return, Rita will become rich. Somehow, this is only the first act.
Four years later, Rita shines. Gone are his bushy eyebrows and shabby suits, replaced by the kind of grooming that only money and genetics can produce like Saldana. And she’s living a metropolitan life in London, something we get to see very briefly, when she meets another woman who has gone through a major transformation, Emilia Perez.
Audiard briefly plays with the idea that Rita believes Emilia is there to kill her, in order to rid the world of any remaining evidence of people who know what happened. In reality, she just misses her children and wants them to live with her back in Mexico. If you’re wondering where all those “Mrs.” are, it’s up to Rita to convince them to move in with Emilia once again, posing as an aunt they’ve never met before. Have met. The comparison to “Doubtfire” comes into play. ,
Despite being a poorly written character, Saldana gives Rita a captivating fierceness. It’s strange to spend so much time with someone and feel completely disconnected from who they are and what they want. She simply follows others, a receptacle for everyone else’s decisions with little power or agency of her own.
At the beginning of the film, Rita debates with a Hong Kong plastic surgeon about whether changing the body has any effect on the soul. He doesn’t think so. She does so, and goes one step further and sings, “Changing souls changes society, changing societies changes everything.” It’s a beautiful idea that the film handles clumsily in its maximalist, broken-down way that values big set-pieces and high drama over authentic emotions.
At first Emilia seems completely changed, no longer the vengeful, jealous, violent cartel leader she once was. He is soft-spoken, sympathetic and cheerful. She starts a foundation to find all the missing and give their families a chance for a proper burial and farewell. He also gets love. And yet she can’t see Jesse moving on. It’s the stuff of soap operas – and not necessarily funny. Here, this could also be read as dangerously reductive.
Jesse sometimes feels like he’s part of an entirely different movie, or rather, a music video that somehow appears to pay homage to Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, and Robert Rodriguez. It’s fun and wild at times, and Gomez completely commits to being a woman burning in the fires of madness. But he and the film veer toward absurdity, offering little in the way of relief or catharsis. After all those big ideas, all those grand themes and genre-busting gestures, we’re left with surprisingly little to latch onto.
“Emilia Perez,” released in theaters Friday and streaming Nov. 13 by Netflix, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “some violent content, sexual content, language.” Running time: 132 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
[ad_2]
