“Emilia Pérez” Is an Incurious Musical About a Trans Drug Lord

The artifice of musicals and the exaggeration of melodrama derive their importance not as escapes from reality but as illuminations of it. The two genres converge to startling effect in “Emilia Pérez,” a Mexico-set extravaganza, by the veteran French director Jacques Audiard, about a lawyer’s dealings with a drug-cartel kingpin. The movie abounds in dramatic twists and vibrant song-and-dance numbers, but they’re more for show rather than expressing any underlying substance. Instead of suggesting depths of thought and feeling lying below the surfaces of busy lives, the movie’s exaggerations and artifices merely serve Audiard’s vigorous yet narrowly deterministic approach to the story.

The attorney, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), is brilliant and frustrated. As the associate to a prominent defense lawyer (Eduardo Aladro), she has to write courtroom speeches that he simply memorizes and work on cases that conflict with her sense of justice. At the start, she’s helping to exonerate a man whom she believes to be guilty of killing his wife, and her frustration bursts forth in a musical scene set in the street: dancing among a choreographed troupe of passersby, she sings about “justice for sale” and about tales of violence and love unfolding in “the courtroom of your conscience.” (A little later, she vents her professional frustrations in a musical number set in the empty courthouse, backed by an all-female cleaning crew.) But then comes an opportunity that seems to offer a way out. The drug-cartel boss, named Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), having spotted her talent and frustration, has an unusual assignment for her. He summons her with the promise of vast riches in a Swiss bank account and explains the job: she must arrange gender-reassignment surgery for him and the comprehensive reorganization of his life and family which the transition will entail. Manitas’s mix of temptation and intimidation brooks no refusal: “To hear is to accept,” he tells Rita, and she does both.

At this early point, Rita is portrayed as both a subordinate who spends her time writing documents in a cramped office and a completely plugged-in player whom Manitas sends on worldwide missions with an “unlimited” budget. For him, she checks out a Bangkok clinic zealously selling what Rita calls “sex-change operations,” and we get a splashy musical sequence under bright O.R. lights. (“Vaginoplasty!” “Yes!” “And penoplasty!” “Yes, yes!”) She also consults a doctor in Tel Aviv who launches a quiet, catchy, and utterly dubious musical number with the warning that he works on bodies but “will never fix the soul.” He counsels against the procedure—oddly, no one uses the contemporary term “reassignment”—but ultimately operates on Manitas.

Although Rita is working for a criminal and being lavishly showered with his ill-gotten gains, she is, for once, doing what she considers principled work. (The dangers and complexities of her behind-the-scenes dealings remain offscreen, hand-waved away.) But her work becomes ever more intricate and risky once Manitas reëmerges after surgery with a new identity: the Emilia Pérez of the title (still played, now without masculine drag, by Gascón, who came out as trans in 2018). Rita moves Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two young sons to Switzerland, ostensibly for their protection, furnishing them with false names and real money. To account for Manitas’s disappearance, his death is staged, and Emilia begins a new life. She has no apparent plan other than to live grandly on funds that have been effectively laundered by Manitas’s apparent demise.

Four years later, Emilia (whose life in the interim remains unexplored) summons Rita again, for help with a new subterfuge. She misses her children and has a daring plan for getting them and Jessi into her Mexico City household (in spite of conflicts in the relationship, expressed in Jessi’s writhing, thrashing, wrathful song and dance on a bed and in a fantasy disco). Emilia keeps a foot in her previous life, with the power of wealth and the menace of violence near at hand. Nonetheless, in penitence for her ruthless ways as Manitas, she founds an organization, La Lucecita (“the little light”), to search for victims of cartel-related violence. She boldly makes herself its public face, while entrusting the practicalities to Rita.

The many layers of deception and the multiple dimensions of romantic complications on which Emilia builds her new life give rise to floridly operatic drama. The big leaps of time, the major changes that occur in their gaps, the large-scale social action that appears as if with a snap of the fingers offer chances for the songs and dances to deliver the subjective power and the emotional energy of all that’s left implicit. Yet the musical numbers, ranging from garish to jazzy, sentimental to furious, don’t have the revelatory force of a good opera’s arias or of a good musical’s songs. The dances merely keep matters moving at a level of engaging distraction more befitting of TV commercials. Even a passionate number in which Rita reveals the sordid backgrounds of La Lucecita’s rich and powerful patrons is an inconsequential and impersonal flash.

Moreover, the characterizations of both Emilia and Rita betray not only Audiard’s confidence in his ability to keep an audience on tenterhooks and damn the details, but—above all—his basic incuriosity about them, about the implications of the lives that they lead. The complexities and peculiarities of Rita’s collaboration with, first, Manitas and then Emilia are delivered and dropped in quick lines of dialogue. As for Emilia, the movie turns a tragic heroine of sorts into a protagonist without an inner life, a chess piece to be moved on a board of labelled identities and hot-button concerns. Audiard essentializes Emilia’s gender reassignment as a transformation into a world-mother figure. This is trivializing and dismissive, not because such a transformation is unlikely but because the director doesn’t render it plausible—doesn’t give Emilia ideas, memories, a point of view, a voice.

Even the well-wrought suspense is left in a void; the movie doesn’t offer so much as a glimmer of interest in what Emilia hopes for or fears when she audaciously presents herself as a suddenly prominent public figure. This is all the more depressing because the story is rich in piquant practicalities and symbolic associations—opportunities for imbuing small gestures with vast power, for magnifying the moral challenges and emotional conflicts of daily life, and for expressing philosophical thought in plain and populist terms. In rare moments, “Emilia Pérez” offers tantalizing hints of the movie that might have been (as in one blink-like scene involving a knife and a gun, or another of a heart-to-heart interrogation of Jessi by Emilia). It also provides a spectacular springboard for its cast. Gascón, who shared the award for Best Actress at Cannes this year with three of her co-stars, incarnates Emilia with calm command and wry grandeur, with a wit on the edge of authority and vulnerability; Saldaña delivers thought in action, passionate energy suggesting untapped power and purpose.

But, for the most part, it seems as if Audiard can’t be bothered. His adoption of genres and story lines for their own sake, with indifference to their significance, is more or less the basis of his career. (I wrote about this cavalier approach to his subjects in reviews of his 2009 crime drama, “A Prophet,” and his 2021 romance, “Paris, 13th District.”) His work represents an inversion of the relationship between subject matter and narrative: instead of relying on the formal devices of storytelling to elucidate the stories’ characters and milieus, he squeezes the life out of characters and subjects in order to fit the procrustean limits of an efficient story. “Emilia Pérez” presents twists and turns that exhaust themselves in the strain to stoke excitement; the movie is a wild ride to nowhere. ♦