From the first frames of Emilia Perezwriter-director Jacques Audiard (Dheepan, Rust and bone, The sisters brothers) makes it clear that this is going to be a musical. Not a backstage-style musical where the songs take place in a performance context, nor a classic Broadway-to-Hollywood musical, where characters only burst into song in moments of heightened emotion. Here the songs seem to emerge from the landscape that surrounds the characters even before we meet them: a long aerial view of Mexico City at night echoes with an eerie polyphonic chant. These appear to be the combined voices of the city’s junk sellers, who patrol the streets with loudspeaker vans asking for used appliances. Later, the repetitive thrum of tires on the highway will turn into a character’s staccato plea for recognition and self-transformation—what in a more conventional musical would be called their “I Do” song.

Audiard initially envisioned it Emilia Perezbased on a chapter from the 2018 novel Enice by French author Boris Razon, as an opera, and the flamboyant theatricality of the resulting film is a testament to that origin. Emilia Perez features not just one but three divas, each given more than one extended aria in which to express her outrageous emotions: anger, longing, fulfillment, frustration, longing. In just over two hours, this film covers a series of events that take place on multiple continents over a period of approximately five years. Part crime caper, part domestic melodrama, part meditation on the mystery of selfhood, the story will involve suspense, disguised identity, the search for redemption and tragic hubris – a full complement of themes from genres as diverse as film noir and the like Three-hankie films, once known as ‘women’s films’.

Although Emilia Perez is not a film intended only for a female audience, but a film that deeply reflects on the embodied experience of being a woman, a condition that some characters undergo as a form of captivity – an unhappily kept woman sings about her life in the proverbial ‘golden cage’. ”—while others see womanhood as a potential site for personal and social reinvention. As the transgender heroine (or is she an anti-heroine?) of the title, Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón (a trans performer who first found fame in her native country before transitioning) gives one of history’s most transformative and moving performances. years, creating a character so expansive and so full of contradictions that it’s possible to find her simultaneously admirable and irredeemable. Gascón’s powerful central presence rather than highlights the excellent supporting work of Zoe Saldaña, revealing entirely new sides of herself as a singer and dancer, and of Selena Gomez, who wraps her melancholy mafia wife persona in flashes of scabrous humor and a self-sabotaging attitude. trail of cruelty.

The entire first act of Emilia Perez centers not on the title character, but on Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a criminal lawyer at a high-profile firm in Mexico City. When her sexist boss, who relies heavily on her preparation to win his case, manages to keep a wealthy woman killer out of prison, Rita sings her anger about working for the bad guys in a ferocious diss track over a choir of cleaning ladies. . But someone even worse is about to call her with a proposal. The infamous cartel leader known as Manitas Del Monte (Gascón) wants to hire someone her and offers more money than she could ever hope to earn in exchange for Rita’s help in carrying out a top-secret plan: Manitas plans to fake her own death and undergo extensive gender confirmation surgery so she can live as the woman she sees herself as. has always felt. are.

Executing Manitas’ plan will saddle Rita with the miserable task of pretending to drug lord’s wife Jessi (Gomez) and two young children that their beloved husband and parent is dead and that they have been sent to a safe house for their own protection. Switzerland have to move. . Rita also travels to Bangkok and Tel Aviv to consult with the world’s most elite specialists in gender transition – the opportunity for a dazzling musical montage of a song with the unforgettable title ‘La Vaginoplastia’.

The first act ends with the transition of Manitas and the emergence of Emilia, whose self-appointment we see as she prepares to leave her hospital room and rejoin the world. I won’t reveal much more about the plot after this point, because one of this film’s greatest strengths is its lurid confidence in its own unpredictable unfolding. Let’s leave it at this: Emilia, whose elegant high-femme self-presentation makes her truly unrecognizable as the macho gangster she once seemed to be, insinuates herself back into the lives of her wife and children, claiming to be Manitas’ wealthy cousin . Rita is also drawn into the family’s life as Emilia’s partner in a new venture, a charity that seeks to undo some of the damage Emilia has done in her secret criminal past. In the process, Emilia meets and falls in love with an abused widow, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), while Jessi meets an old flame (Édgar Ramírez) whose arrival on the scene takes the story south of the border. noir territory it’s been circling around all this time.

The songs, by French composer team Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais, aren’t exactly the kind you tap your toe to; they are discursive and highly plot-specific, similar to the use of music in Leos Carax’s memorably bizarre Annet a few years back. But in their performance contexts – which can range from huge choreographed audience scenes to an intimate duet in which Emilia and her young son say goodnight before bed – the songs make perfect dramatic sense and offer opportunities for unlimited performance by a great ensemble. .

In a showstopper of a song performed at a lavish charity event in Mexico City, Saldaña dances on tabletops in a red velvet power suit as he delivers scathing (yet sexy!) criticism of the country’s corrupt ruling class. Selena Gomez only gets one big solo number (plus a few duets and an end credits song), but the script gives her plenty of opportunities to turn what could be a stereotypical gangster into someone much trickier and more complex. Yet it’s Gascón whose abysmal charisma carries the film, even despite some of its rockier tonal transitions. This is a performance that will be talked about for the Best Actress awards – she’s already considered a favorite for the Oscar, just behind Anora‘s Mikey Madison — and it should be. Gascón manages to create two completely different personas, complete with their own singing voices, for her pre- and post-transition self, and using only her voice and face, she shows us how alienated the Manitas we first meet , feels in and of her own personality. body.

Emilia Perez received a mixed response during its Cannes debut early this year, with some critics swooning, while others pointed out that the film’s wild mix of styles and moods never quite builds up to a coherent character portrait. Ultimately, what are we to make of the morally conflicted, sometimes self-centered, always unpredictable, but magnanimous Emilia? While I found the film utterly moving, I can admit that there may be something in Audiard’s treatment of the character (a cis man) that participates in the well-known archetype of the tragic trans woman, from Jared Leto’s Rayon in The Dallas Buyers Club after Lili Elbe by Eddie Redmayne The Danish girl. But Gascón’s generosity and dexterity as a performer allow her to push such boundaries scene after scene. Until the very end – which left me clapping my hand over my mouth in shock and then bursting into tears – she continues to find newer and deeper ways to be Emilia Pérez, a character (and a film) that is all about the never-finished project. of learning to become yourself.