There is so much going on in “Emilia Pérez,” the audacious musical-melodrama-thriller from filmmaker Jacques Audiard, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer ambition of it all.
There is obvious craft and moments of true transcendence, beauty and horror. Set around Mexico City, this is a movie about family, about ambition, about the possibility of change, cartels, human disappearances, gender affirmation, money and corruption.
The characters break into fantastical musical numbers throughout: Some are filled with rage, others with joy and hope. And yet even with all that life and color on screen, there’s a distinct rift between the big emotions the characters are cycling through and what the audience is feeling, which is practically nothing. It’s as if “Emilia Pérez” forgot to invite us along for the ride.
And it is quite a ride: A cartel boss named Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) has a smart but undervalued lawyer, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), kidnapped. Manitas wants gender confirmation surgery, and for Rita to handle the logistics: hiring the discreet surgeon, faking Manitas’ death and transporting the boss’ wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two kids to a new home in Switzerland. In return, Rita will receive riches.
Four years later, Rita’s gotten a glow up. Gone are her unkempt eyebrows and frumpy suit, replaced with the kind of grooming only money and genetics like Saldaña’s can produce. And she’s leading a cosmopolitan life in London, something that we get to see all too briefly, when she meets another woman who’s gone through a major transformation, Emilia Pérez (Gascón).
Audiard plays with the idea that Rita assumes Emilia is there to kill her, to rid the world of any evidence of those who know what happened. In actuality, she just misses her kids and wants them back in Mexico to live with her. It’s up to Rita to get Jessi and the kids to move once more, posing as an aunt they’ve never met.
Saldaña lends a captivating fierceness to Rita, despite being a terribly underwritten character. It’s strange to spend so much time with someone and feel entirely detached from them. She just follows others, a receptacle for everyone else’s decisions with little arc or agency of her own.
Early on, Rita debates (in song) with a plastic surgeon in Hong Kong about whether changing the body has an effect on the soul. He doesn’t think so. She does, singing, “changing the soul changes society, changing society changes everything.” It’s a lovely idea that the film handles clumsily in its maximalist, go-for-broke way that values massive set pieces and high drama over authentic emotion.
At first, Emilia seems entirely changed, no longer the vindictive, jealous, violent cartel leader she once was. She is soft- spoken, empathetic and happy. She starts a foundation to find disappeared people and give their families the chance of a proper farewell. She even finds love. And yet she can’t handle watching his wife move on. It’s the stuff of soap operas — and not necessarily the fun ones.
It feels like Jessi is part of an entirely different film, or rather a music video that seems to be paying homage to Pedro Almodóvar, David Lynch and Robert Rodriguez. It is fun at times, and Gomez fully commits to the bit of this gaslit woman.
But she and the movie crescendo into absurdity, with little in the way of relief or catharsis. After all those big ideas, all those grand themes and genre- subverting gestures, we’re left with shockingly little to hold on to.
MPA rating: R (for some violent content, sexual material and language)
Running time: 2:12
How to watch: In theaters, streaming Nov. 13 on Netflix