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    • From Mexican cartel leader to the operating table of Tel Aviv – Israel Culture
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    From Mexican cartel leader to the operating table of Tel Aviv – Israel Culture

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    Emilia Perez, a film now in theaters in Israel, is a mess of a film that aims to offer the fun of a musical telenovela with a trendy story about a drug cartel leader who undergoes a so-called sex change operation and is now referred to as gender affirming surgery.

    The style is Pedro Almodovar meets Baz Luhrmann, a film where the production design and visual details hold your attention more than the plot or characters.

    But for Israeli moviegoers, it has a unique plot twist that takes the main characters to Tel Aviv, which is shown as the destination the cartel leader chooses – out of many – for her operation.

    A straightforward surgeon, Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir, a Ukrainian-born Israeli actor known to international audiences for his work in Schindler’s List, Homeland, Away and many other roles) is given the cartel leader, initially Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascon), whose name is later changed in Emilia, to delve deeply into his motivations for undergoing the procedure.

    This film, which had its world premiere in Cannes in 2024 (where it won the Jury Prize and Best Actress for its four leads), was probably filmed before the current war broke out, but it is still interesting that it was chosen to make this clear identify identified character. Israeli doctor and his clinic in Tel Aviv in a positive light. This was an unusual choice, and it’s worth noting that director and co-screenwriter Jacques Audiard (known for films like A Prophet and Dheepan) has visited Israel in the past to promote his work.

    Tel Aviv Skyline 370 (credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)

    Israeli accents in the film

    While the Tel Aviv clinic scenes were filmed in a studio somewhere and not in Israel, this sequence has a real touch of Israeli atmosphere: a television in the clinic shows a clip of Shauli and Irena, the not-so-bright Israeli couple the comedy sketch show Eretz NehederetIsraeli version of Saturday evening live. This scene got the biggest laughs of the entire movie from the audience I saw it with.

    Although the film is billed as a musical comedy, there weren’t many laughs in an often visually appealing but mostly uninvolving story about Rita (Zoe Saldana, one of those blue creatures in Avatar), a lawyer making a living. defending men from violence – we see early on that she acquits a man who murdered his wife – and who has been chosen by Manitas to discreetly manage his operation. Rita sends Manitas’ young American wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their children to Switzerland, saying they need to be there to be safe, and that Manitas has been killed.

    Four years later, Rita meets the former cartel leader, now called Emilia, in London. Emilia, longing for her children, tricks Rita into working for her again and taking Jessi and the children back to Mexico City, where she hides in plain sight as a woman. Jessi and the children are not too happy about the move, having become accustomed to the snowy luxury of the Swiss Alps, but they adapt and rather meekly accept that Emilia is an aunt they have never met before.

    Reunited with her children, Emilia blossoms and convinces Rita to hang out. Rita, who favored unflattering pantsuits for success in the early scenes, begins to dress more femininely, wearing tiny silk halter tops that may remind you of the outfits suburban drug dealer Nancy Botwin wore in the series Weeds.

    Emilia, filled with the goodness that, as the film tells it, a successful gender confirmation procedure can bring, begins devoting her time and her illegally amassed fortune to helping locate the bodies of the approximately 100,000 Mexicans who have disappeared as a result of criminal violence. , which closed their families.

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    Emilia’s kindness is its own reward, but there is another, and she begins a romance with Epifania (Adriana Paz), a woman who is actually relieved to know that her abusive, missing husband is dead and can no longer harm her.

    At the same time, Jessi has moved on to Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez, who played Gianni Versace in American Crime Story), who wants to marry her and adopt her children. Emilia is not happy to hear that if the marriage takes place, she will lose her children again, and it turns out that it is not so easy to thwart even a female former drug cartel leader.

    The cast sings many songs, most with extremely literal lyrics about what is happening in the story, and performs several dance numbers. These will please some, but for many moviegoers they will grow tiresome very quickly. Selena Gomez, known as a singer as well as an actress, is entertaining when she sings, and there is one very poignant and visually effective lament from the families of the disappeared that really gets through to us, especially as we still hope for the return of the 101 hostages still trapped in Gaza. But at other times it seems like the songs and dances have been thrown in to cover up the fact that the story has slowed down.

    Although the four leading actresses, Saldana, Gomez, Gascon and Paz, shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes, their work is only occasionally distracting. Gomez can, as mentioned, sing and can be seen as the spoiled but neglected woman, and Gascon and Paz are tasteful as the lovebirds. However, Saldana is pale as a lawyer. When she sings and dances at a benefit for rich hypocrites and supposedly stops the show, she seems like an incredibly serious dance student rather than someone you can’t stop watching.

    It is also worth noting that, apart from the scenes with the Israeli doctor, the film is in Spanish, with Hebrew titles. It’s rare for films with regular actors to be in a language other than English, so that was a nice touch that added to the atmosphere.

    Most of the film is set in Mexico City, and the look is often reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which was also set there, while the larger-than-life character of the reformed drug lord, who is now a woman, could have come. straight out of an Almodovar movie.

    The vibrant but crumbling setting shows a city steeped in violence and corruption, but also with a kind of raw beauty that sometimes emerges unexpectedly. It’s a shame that the spirit of this fascinating city didn’t shine through more clearly amid the easygoing, virtue-signalling plot.



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