El mal

EMILIA PÉREZ

2024

Written and directed by Jacques Audiard

Spoilers: moderate

The first ten or fifteen minutes of Emilia Pérez are, I think, its worst, and it does get better from there; but they also do their job of telling you pretty much what the whole thing is going to be like.  Several of those first ten or fifteen minutes comprise what was, at that point, the worst-staged musical number I think I've ever seen, concerning the lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) drafting a closing defense-side argument for her murder case, and it represents just about the most disconnected relationship imaginable between the content of a song and the content of its choreography, so while both are insipid, I think the choreography must take the cake, considering that one of our heroines singing about the burden of trying to zealously represent a man she knows to be a murderer inspired choreographer Damien Chalet to an act of sheer brilliance best described as "random assholes at the store and at the farmer's market badly and inexpressively cavort around Saldaña, whilst she types into a laptop."  (It's also perhaps unappealingly clear in virtually all of the more setpiece-like musical numbers that Chalet was the choreographer on Suspiria, which works out on one of them, and on none of the rest.)

If this was the worst musical number I've ever seen, it did not remain that way through this film's runtime: about an hour later Emilia Pérez does actually dip lower, with this anemic thing with Selena Gomez's wife character that involves her stomping out of her bedroom into this notional stage space and... cutting back after doing virtually nothing and elaborating upon that in no way.  The choreography somehow manages an "and such small portions" problem, too: frankly, it's bizarre that this film even is a musical in the first place, when it's clear nobody's heart was truly in it, with most of the songs being truncated little sung soliloquies and not even that many of those.  Now, let's be fair: there's one genuinely good choreographic effort, finding Rita dancing jaggedly and contemptuously at all the Altonian mannequin people that Chalet has had frozen in time; they are Mexico's corrupt overclass, attending a fundraiser held by Rita's client and boss, another member of Mexico's corrupt overclass.  It's all the more annoying because with Saldaña I guess Chalet, and Emilia Pérez's writer-director, Jacques Audiard, did have access to somebody who knew how to use her body to tell a story, but she's not allowed to do so very often.  There is, furthermore, what one might describe as an idea for a good idea.  It concerns a bunch of heads floating, Zardoz-style, within a black void, and eventually these faces (representing people who've lost loved ones to the cartels) fill the void as they are independently illuminated.  I know it's a good idea because I've seen the Busby Berkeley movies that invented this idea, almost a century ago now, and used it for more visually- and emotionally-interesting ends.

As for the other ways that this opening movement tells us much about the subsequent two hours to come, we learn that a lot of it is going to be repulsively badly photographed, thanks to some gruesome color grading that makes Saldaña under fluorescent lights (and people with Saldaña's dark copper skintone) look like she may well have recently received a transfusion from someone with gamma-irradiated blood (and when our co-protagonist is an attorney, this is a pretty perilous association to have fosited upon you!), though by no means should you conclude that this exhausts the sins of a cinematography that's only okay in that Altonian showpiece I mentioned, and occasionally in snippets here and there, wherein Paul Guilhaume can rely on full-on solid color club lighting or LEDs in pitch darkness.  As for what we learn about the movie's storytelling from its opening minutes, it's that Emilia Pérez thinks a closing argument that includes the phrase "does my client look like a murderer?" is such a piece of rhetorical genius that Rita could be rightfully angry when her inept boss takes credit for it.  It also believes the best agent to find gender affirming care for you is a murder lawyer that you don't even have a preexisting association with, so you basically just picked a random person with a college degree up off the street—and so what we learn, thereby, is that Audiard knows nothing about nothing and has unaccountably made it a point of pride how he did little-to-no research on any of the foreign-to-him topics his movie would take on, which is how Emilia Pérez has invited the scorn of the by-far vaster numbers of people who are not as grievously offended as I am by, for instance, bad musical numbers, or bad cinematography, though I do feel outright viscerally trespassed against that this could possibly get an Oscar nomination for the latter.  (I feel only slightly less so that it got an editing nomination inasmuch as the editing isn't atrocious, but it is also deeply unspecial.  Between this and Beast it makes one wonder if the French have forgotten cross-cutting even exists.)  Well, at least the Best Song nomination, for "El Mal," the Altonian number, was for the best song in this movie, and while this bar is set somewhere near the transition zone to the Earth's mantle, I guess that's something to hold onto.

As I've kind of already started off on a summary, I should finish it, though I'm sure we're all well aware what happens in Emilia Pérez by now: in the hinterlands of Mexico (Emilia Pérez, I would imagine incorrectly, conceives of all organized crime in that country as taking place in mobile Mad Max camps set up in abandoned quarries), there is a crime boss, Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón); Manitas's most deeply-cherished wish is to medically transition to female, and part-and-parcel to that, break off decisively from the cartel she runs, escaping, firstly, her obligations as a gangster, and secondly her obligations as a husband to Jessi (Gomez) and father to their two small children, though the latter causes Manitas somewhat more regret.  With this in mind, Manitas taps Rita to oversee all the details, again for no really apparent reason (even the transfer of assets into the possession of a new identity, which is where a lawyer would actually come in, it seems like what you'd want is one specialized in trusts and corporate reorganization, or, in fact, straight-up cartel financial operations, and I would expect Manitas has such a lawyer, rather than a woman who, as far as I can tell, and this is at best, is just some junior partner at a criminal law firm).  But Rita carries out her task, and Manitas vanishes, successfully staging a false death, and assumes the new name "Emilia Pérez."

That would be that until Emilia contrives to meet Rita again in London, to once again employ her expertise and support to retrieve Jessi and the children from their "protective" exile in Switzerland, so that Emilia can likewise return to Mexico City as Manitas's "cousin," and reconnect with the family she lost.  Rita arranges it precisely so, and for a while what Emilia and Rita occupy their time with instead is establishing an NGO to "find"—that is, "confirm the deaths and locate the corpses of"—the victims of the cartels, until eventually some drama reenters the picture (though it may be incorrect to imply it had drama previously) because Emilia, no matter what else has changed, and no matter what she thinks, has not changed her nature.

There's a good movie somewhere in here, and I guess I'll cop that it's not that bad even as constituted, even if it's not sufficiently not-bad for me to even feel all that much force in my usual impulse to get real irritated with the dogpiling mentality and the lockstep elimination of any possibility of publicly liking the thing without losing some measure of social status in doing so; and Emilia Pérez has gotten that even worse than usual, for while queer commentators and Nazi commentators are both audiences to whom the adjective "easily-riled" could be applied, they don't typically hate the same things.  Those thirteen Oscar nominations Emilia Pérez has received have been, obviously, the most absolute curse for it, bringing down scrutiny neither it nor its jerk lead actress were likely to survive, when with some generosity I think we can sort of see Audiard's side of it and reckon that all he originally wanted to do was to wander through some half-assed ideas about transness, Mexico, and life, and because, after all, who the fuck even does watch French cinema—or, for that matter, Netflix originals—he didn't initially suspect he'd ever wind up under the baleful gaze of the whole wide world.  But it all suggests that Academy ballots were filled out by people who didn't actually watch the movie, but really wanted a trans Best Actress for 2025, because such a thing would immediately depose Donald Trump, and they clearly haven't done transwomen many favors in the process.  (Perhaps it's arrogant of me, but I bet I could pinpoint with timestamp accuracy the exact moment that the experience for trans viewers, extremely abrasive even from the start, actually drew blood.)

But yeah, it does suck enough that I can basically only point to versions of it that might have sucked less, because it's more like this movie—which never much coheres into any kind of tight narrative, for even by the hour mark, it's arrived at a grand total of two plot points—still contains half a dozen jumping off points for a good movie, and it continually refuses to actually jump off into any of them.  Let's just go down the list.  There's the actual cartel thriller it starts off as (imagine the Emilia Pérez where Rita, given the keys to the treasury of a presumed-dead cartel boss, actually exploits that opportunity to the maximum!); or it could have been a cartel comedy (because I could also imagine a "wait, I actually am trans?" version of Some Like It Hot, which probably wouldn't be any more fraught than what we got, and would almost undoubtedly be more fun).  There's the possible buddy comedy, with Rita and Emilia (I am at a loss to understand why or even how they establish their fast friendship in this movie, or why Rita is remotely interested in still practicing law anymore at all, or why Rita doesn't perceive Emilia's crazypants third act turn as betraying their relationship, too, since it threatens to expose her own extravagantly unlawful activities).  Of course, there's simply the cartel boss transition procedural and/or character study that falls into the middle of the first act's abyss, but, like I said, Audiard isn't too keen on the whole "learning and synthesizing information" thing, and this would have required research about how to fake deaths, forge documents, and probably something about a quintessentially-macho cartel culture.  (I'm going to throw out a mostly rhetorical question now about how plausible it is that this cartel boss as presented was on HRT for two years, along with a serious plot question about what kind of complete garbage marriage you'd have to have for your spouse not to notice that for two years.)

Hell, there's that whole comedy of remarriage angle directed at Jessi that it almost has, inasmuch as it's probably the closest it gets to actually having any plot or any interesting character arcs; whereas I am not the first person to note that to the extent Emilia Pérez does have a plot, it's the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire.  It sure doesn't stay any kind of comedy with this material.  Yet it asks for a sympathy that I certainly wasn't willing to grant, while doing not a damned thing to help me understand why characters in the movie would want to extend any sympathy, either, since Jessi is flagrantly the wronged party, pretty much throughout, and rather egregiously so once we get into it.  Finally, I guess there's some kind of perverse satire about wealthy monsters, but I swear to God the movie, and maybe Gascón in particular, despite all this being the movie's thematic spine and the animating force of Gascón's Emilia, do not seem to realize that there is such nastiness in its heart.  It somehow can't communicate the slightest irony about a secret ex-cartel boss semi-literally digging up the bodies of cartel victims to give their families' closure.  The movie simply seems outright oblivious to how its final musical number, and its final set of images, are altogether morally obscene.

I've said there's no plot, but naturally it does still have something like a story.  You know this because what that story fancies itself to be about is frequently brought up, in either dialogue or in lyrics, though I don't believe I'd say what it's about is rightfully explored; it's framed as a question, "does transitioning make you a morally different person?", or even, "does transitioning wipe away your sins?", which it answers in the negative, and as that is indeed a fairly "no shit" proposition, perhaps we can provide a more charitable reinterpretation of that question as "can even truly heinous people redeem themselves?"  But if Emilia Pérez's iffy trans metaphysics are to be perceived, rather, as Emilia's own iffy assumption that her redemption was already achieved, which could serve as a tragic flaw, the movie just isn't built to take advantage of that.  But then, it's not really built to take advantage of anything, and while it clearly must believe itself to be a very humane portrait of sad and damaged individuals, there's possibly only one note of genuinely-observed humanity in it.  It's when we find the extras portraying Emilia's maids getting unreasonably excited about playing the arcade skiing game Emilia bought for her kids to help them get over their homesickness for Switzerland.  Every other Goddamn thing in the movie is just figures, none of whom are characters, being moved through their paces to get to whatever thing the movie wants to do next.  Sometimes that's a musical number about vaginoplasties.  Sometimes that's a violent kidnapping.  Sometimes it's Gascón's performance resetting without any of the subtle groundwork that needs to be there to get Emilia to where her movie needs her to be for the new thing.  And all of that only very faintly resembles "a story" at all.

Score: 4/10