erik lundegaard

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Tuesday January 14, 2025

Movie Review: Emilia Perez (2024)

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the early 2010s, Jacques Audiard made some of my favorite movies, particularly “Un Prophete” and “Rust and Bone,” but since then we’d lost touch, and I wanted to get reacquainted. As the man said, “We should talk, we should always have talked.” So I watched this.

I also watched it because Zoe Saldana won the Golden Globe—and because she’s Zoe Saldana. I guess the movie won awards, too? Wait, Zoe won for supporting? Isn’t she lead? She’s top-billed, and she seems to have the most screen time. On the other hand, she does feel supporting, since the story isn’t about her. She’s there as facilitator and observer. The story is someone else’s. The title character’s.

I get why Audiard went musical with it. There’s something operatic about the story: huge twists and turns.* If you did it straight, it would seem over-the-top. Or more over-the-top.

(* Per Wikipedia, yes, Audiard originally wrote it as an opera libretto.)

I just wish I liked it more.

The whole nine yards
Rita Castro (Saldana) is second-chair to a less-competent criminal defense attorney in Mexico City, and while helping acquit a drug-cartel figure she wonders (though song and dance) if this is the life she wants. Saldana has the moves and pipes, by the way. You can tell she’s trained. And her acting here is a revelation. For God’s sake, Hollywood, get this woman away from green screens and into better scripts!

After the acquittal, Rita gets a phone call from a mysterious, gravely voiced man, offering work. She’s told to go to a newsstand, does, and is promptly kidnapped: bag over the head, car ride to nowhere, the whole nine yards. Who’s responsible? Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the most powerful drug cartel leader in the country. What does he want? He wants to be a she. He wants gender-affirming surgery and he wants Rita to facilitate it so that it happens soon and nobody knows. Manitas will disappear and Emilia Perez will be born.

So it’s off to Bangkok and Tel Aviv. I don’t get why, when they need to cut through the red tape, they don’t go the Bangkok route—where the red tape is, I assume, almost nonexistent—but no, that’s when Rita goes to Israel. There she finds a sympathetic ear in Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), who is serious, quick and by the book. He actually flies to Mexico City and does the whole nine yards (bag over the head) to ensure the patient’s psychological profile is fine. Despite Manitas being who he is (a mass murderer, etc.), he passes, and the surgery goes forward.

Four years later, Rita is lawyering in London, or at least hobnobbing with the jet-set crowd, when, at a fancy dinner party, she’s introduced to another woman from Mexico City. It takes a minute for the other shoe to drop. “It’s you.” “Bingo.” What does Emilia want? She wants her wife and children, safely stored in Switzerland, to return to live with her, Manitas’ “sister,” in Mexico. 

Me: Wait, she’s not going to become a better person because she’s a woman, is she?

Bingo. During lunch at an outdoor café, Emilia is handed a missing persons notice by a distraught woman whose husband was disappeared by the cartels, and, with her inside info, Emilia gets the answer. Then she helps another and another. An NGO is created. Most of these men are dead but at least the women have answers and can move on with their lives. As a result, Emilia becomes a beloved national figure. She also begins a romantic relationship with one of the women, Epifania (Adriana Paz), who was terrified her abusive husband wasn’t dead but still alive.

So where’s the drama now? With Manitas’ wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), who seems less interested in rearing her children than partying with new BF Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). The real problem occurs when Jessi announces she’s going to marry Gustavo. And the children? Well, they’ll come live with her, of course. 

That’s when we see the Manitas in Emilia. She erupts, rages at and physically attacks Jessi, calling Gustavo a pimp. She has her men beat up Gustavo and toss money at him to leave town. He doesn’t. He kidnaps Emilia, cut off three fingers, and hold her for ransom.

During a third-act firefight, Emilia finally confesses to Jessi who she is but by then it’s too late. She’s stuffed into the trunk of Gustavo’s car, and, when Jessi pulls a gun on Gustavo to get him to stop, they fight, go over an embankment and the car burst into flames. In the aftermath, songs are sung, and the image of Emilia as folk saint is paraded through the streets of Mexico.

Nice Jewish doctor
Some songs were catchy—the sweetest, I thought, was when one of the children sang how Aunt Emilia smelled like their father—but I never got into the characters. Rita is only briefly the main character, then her story is subsumed by Manitas’/Emilia’s, who is (for me) a little needy as a woman. Jessi is a shallow thing and Gustavo a nonentity. I actually liked Dr. Wasserman—who only has a bit part. When Rita was wondering why she couldn’t find a good man, I wondered about him. When it doubt, go nice Jewish doctor.

Has enough been written about the diversity in Audiard’s stories? This isn’t your father’s French cinema:

  • A Muslim kid rises to power in prison
  • A Sri Lankan Tamil warrior becomes a caretaker in Paris
  • A Mexican cartel leader has gender-affirming surgery

The U.N. should be so diverse.

“Emilia Perez” isn’t a bad movie and I hope people see it and lessons are learned. My main takeaway? Get Zoe Saldana better scripts.

Posted at 10:04 AM on Tuesday January 14, 2025 in category Movie Reviews - 2024