One of the biggest fluctuations you’re likely to see this year is Emilie Pérez (now streaming on Netflix), which will test your powers of suspension of disbelief even more than most other musicals. Jacques Audiard directs this unusual song-and-dance soap opera saga starring Zoé Saldana as a lawyer who helps Karla’s cartel boss Sofia Gascon start a new life. Note that this description leads me to use great reductionism, because the premise of the film – which won the ensemble prize and the jury prize at Cannes, making Gascon the first openly trans actress to win such an award – is pretty crazy. Crazy enough that I feel some will like it and others will find it a little too much, although I would say its excess is exactly the reason to like it.

The bottom line: It seems Rita (Saldana) has compromised herself. She’s a lawyer who has just helped a guy who murdered his wife escape conviction. The Mexican justice system is corrupt. Easily handled. And she works at it, skillfully crafting horse-manure arguments that put sordid people back into society. Perhaps her conscience is getting the better of her. Or maybe it’s not? Maybe she’d be happier doing this if she wasn’t playing second fiddle to a show-off lawyer who seems to make a lot more money? Which might explain why Rita does what she does next: she gets a call from a stranger with a vague proposition and a promise to make her very rich, and she doesn’t say no. Red flag! But she doesn’t see him (or chooses to ignore him) and as she timidly approaches the designated meeting place, some goons snatch her, put a bag over her head and take her away into the countryside. Heed the red flags, people, heed the red flags.

But Rita’s general dissatisfaction with her lot in life puts her in a “nothing to lose/everything to gain” situation – although by the time they retire and she sees herself surrounded by a near-militarized drug cartel, she may be on the verge of losing everything. She’s posed opposite Manitas (Gascon), who looks a lot like a crime boss: tattoos, gold teeth, intimidating tone. He saw how skillfully Rita freed his wife’s murderer and realizes that she is ready to accomplish a huge task. Namely, devising and executing a plan that will allow her to fake her own death, undergo the much-desired sex reassignment surgery, and then start a new life with all the enormous sums of money from her old life. Rita is lucky to be in a period of transition and open to new opportunities, because the vibe here is that if she says no, she’ll probably end up full of bullets in a shallow grave. She says yes and seems more willing than not.

The plan involves moving Manitas’ beloved wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two sons to Switzerland, and finding a doctor with slippery ethics willing to perform the operation. Done and done. I can’t say Rita isn’t good at her job – so good, she completes the job, makes a few million dollars and ends up in a fancy restaurant in London four years later. One of the guests is Emilia Perez, who we know is the person formerly known as Manitas, because this movie frequently changes perspective and we had just spent time with the person who is now a she. This seems obvious to us, but it takes Rita a minute to figure it out. Emilia takes Rita aside and offers her another job: taking Jessi and the boys back to Mexico. Emilia misses her family so much. But she can’t reveal her true identity to Jessi, so she’ll have to pretend to be a long-lost aunt.

And it works! Maybe because Jessi is blind, or maybe she didn’t know her partner very well to begin with? I guess that’s not the case impossibleRIGHT? Emilia will also have to find something to do with her time, so the gods of ironic redemption have her partner with Rita to create a non-profit organization that helps families of missing people find their loved ones, or at least what they do. there are some left. And it works too! Perhaps because a key person in the organization knows people who know people who know where many of the bodies are buried. Oh, and I forgot to mention that everyone was singing and/or dancing the whole time. Perhaps because it’s the only way to make this plot contextually plausible, at least in the realm of fantasy fiction.

What films will this remind you of? : Emilie Pérez This is what could happen if Pedro Almodovar directed Mrs. Doubtfire. (I also wonder if 2024 is the big swing year, considering how this, Megalopolis And The bottom challenged us so courageously.)

Performances to watch: Simply put, if Gascon doesn’t draw us in with a powerful, subtly complex performance, the whole thing risks falling apart. Quickly.

Memorable dialogues: At the end of this storyline, Jessi calls Manitas’ voicemail to hear his voice, then utters this doozy: “My pussy still hurts when I think about you.”

Sex and skin: Nothing notable.

Our opinion: Emilie Pérez is a deeply flawed business. The plot is absurd, the characters are superficial, the songs are so-so and the tone is mushy. But Audiard gives the impression of seeing a FILM, a singular exaltation which tends to remove apprehensions. I hate to speculate about a filmmaker’s intention, but perhaps absurdity is the issue here; my struggle to wrap my head around this slippery and fascinating film was ultimately an asset. It kept me focused and on my toes. And visually, it’s lanky and ambitious, relying on the story’s exaggerated theatricality, sharing screens, moving the camera dynamically, staging musical sequences indifferent to the usual grandiose aesthetic of singing and singing. the dance.

I’m hesitant to know more about the film’s setting or politics – its ironies give us a lot of 800 books. bears to wrestle with, and subtlety is not his strong point. Interestingly, Audiard reconstructed Mexico City on the soundstages of his native France, giving a fascinating layer of artifice to a film primarily about artifice itself, a film that certainly seems to wink at us eye under a thick layer of Greek tragedy overtures. Few other films have the audacity to cram soapy melodrama, a bracing shootout, and a Selena Gomez karaoke sequence (among other borderline bonkers stuff) into the same movie and actually make a modicum of sense as a unique work of art.

Once again, to observe it is to stand on quicksand. There is no real protagonist here; While the narrative may lean more toward Saldana as the lead in terms of sheer runtime, the vast majority of the emotional drama is couched in Gascon’s performance. You feel just enough of Emilia’s inner conflict, and that psychology points toward an inevitable dramatic revelation or resolution. You’ll wish it were funnier, and Audiard fails the character somewhat with a conclusion that peters out instead of making a big hit. But by then, we’ve seen a lot of things we’ve never seen before, and the feeling of euphoria that comes with such things is something to be cherished. Taking apart this pleasantly daring film wouldn’t be fun at all.

Our call: Boldness and inventiveness are Emilie PérezThe powers of – and these powers sometimes border on super. Spread it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.