I simply can't stop talking about this film to everyone I know. If Emilia Perez does not win Best Original Screenplay for 2024, and, at the very least, garner nominations for Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia/Manitas and Zoe Saldaña as Rita, then the film industry still has some evolutionary progress ahead.
It's being billed as a musical/comedy, but it's not that at all - it's so much more. Basically, the story is about a Mexican drug cartel leader named Manitas Del Monte. He's a killer. He destroys lives and families. He's married to Jessi (Selena Gomez) and has two young children.
Manitas is also desperate to change his life. I mean, completely - he wants to become a woman and has been undergoing hormone therapy for a long time. He hires Rita, an underappreciated attorney in Mexico, to help him find a surgeon somewhere in the world who can be paid enough to keep his secret, do the head to toe transformational surgery, and help him fake his own death to complete his escape.
Yes, when I tell people just that much about the film, their reaction is always 'WHAT'????
Rita is toiling away in a job where her fellow attorneys, all men, steal her work, her glory and her financial rewards. Thinking she's heading to a meeting with a client, Manitas' men kidnap Rita, throw a sack over her head, then drive her to a one-on-one with the drug lord. She's positive she's going to be killed at any moment. Instead, Manitas lays out his whole unbelieveable plan to her, including the multimillion dollar paycheck she'll receive for helping him.
Rita agrees, at first reluctantly. She travels around the globe, researching and interviewing various plastic surgeons. Eventually she embraces the entire plan. Not only because she sees how much the money will be able to free her from her own life of being near penniless. But also because she begins to care for Manitas, as a friend, begins to trust him. Manitas adores his family, and it's obvious throughout the film that his choice was exceedingly difficult. He has a plan. He has Rita convince Jessi that she and their chidren must flee the country to keep them safe, because there is a drug war on the horizon.
And here's the kicker - it's all done in the style of Evita. That is, it's an operetta. Not a straight-up musical. There are no Oklahoma-style song and dance numbers, where the action stops and the high kicks start. And it's not British satire such as you'd find in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. It's more that the main characters are talking to themselves, thinking out loud, and then they start to walk the streets and start singing their thoughts, with the people surrounding them joining in. To me, the final scenes of Emilia Perez are especially reminiscent of Evita. And, of course, there's the similarity in that Evita Peron, over the course of her rise and fall, transformed herself many times.
Jessi (Gomez) experiences her own tranformation. We are first introduced to her as the pampered wife of Manitas, mother to his children. She wants for nothing. She's exceedingly unlikeable. However, though she certainly knows
he's a killer, she apparently is in the dark regarding Manitas' desire to become a woman. She is heartbroken when informed of his death. A few years pass and Emilia, with Rita's help, moves Jessi and the children into Emilia's own home, introducing herself as a distant relative to Manitas.
Jessi's own transformation begins when she tires of being a bit player in her own life. She eventually makes moves to step out of the life to which that Manitas has her confined.
Narrative-wise, there is an early reveal in the film, between Rita and Manitas, which is the only part that struck me as illogical. Not because of the reveal itself, but how is it possible that Jessi didn't know? Didn't notice what was physically going on with her husband? Yes, she is definitely quite self-absorbed. But that doesn't explain away the plot hole.
Yes, it's a film about the transformation of the body. But in the case of Emilia herself, it's a complete tranformation of her soul as well. There's so much more story here, but I don't want to give the plot away. And whether she's portraying Emilia or Manitas, Karla Sofía Gascón give us an electric performance. Director Jacques Audiard has given audiences one hell of a telenovela.
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