A lawyer, a boss and his wife enter a musical and “Emilia Pérez” is born, French Jacques AudiardIt’s a full-bodied, colorful epic about transformation, redemption, and finding your voice in a difficult world. But also, because it is still an Audiard film, it talks about what we can never escape.

Never one to ignore how rich the crime genre can be in its tales of pain and liberation (“A prophet” “Dheepan”), the writer-director took his biggest hit with “Emilia Pérez,” using its Mexican milieu of cartels and suffering as the basis for a full-throated sing-along in Spanish built around a gender reassignment — a situation that triggers effectively, although unintentionally, a nation’s desire for change. It’s a busy task for any filmmaker, even one as experienced in dealing with domestic turmoil as Audiard.

But he also completed one of his most satisfying projects. movie films to date by centering the experiences of three (and eventually four) fierce women, rather than its usual brooding men. Audiard pushes them all into a kind of feverish melodrama, close to Almodovar, which suits his instinct for sensory cinema. It’s no surprise that he understands the crazy logic of tone and texture of a musical number, aided by editor Juliette Welfling’s rhythmic (but never exaggerated) cutting.

First in the storyline is Zoe Saldaña’s Rita, an overworked lawyer tired of wasting her talents defending violent men, but drawn to a proposition proposed privately one night by fearsome cartel lord Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón): Help facilitate a secret transition operation. and the world will have one less villain and one more fulfilled woman. Two, apparently, if we count the salary that will allow Rita to quit her job. Then again, subtract one, if you consider Manitas’ much younger and unsuspecting wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), who is taken to Switzerland with their two children under the pretense of imminent danger, then made to believe that her husband was murdered.

Selena Gomez in the film “Emilia Pérez”.

(Netflix)

It’s already quite pulp-operatic, with declarative and percussive tunes from Clément Ducol and Camille adding pop to the feelings (rage, worry, nostalgia) of any given scene. But it is when the story moves forward four years and the rich and glamorous Emilia Pérez (Gascón) stages an altercation with a stunned Rita that the narrative of the film’s second act sows a richer tapestry of spectacle and lamentations. Emilia, emotionally attracted by the desire to reconnect and revise her old life, manipulates everyone’s destiny upon her return to Mexico: Jessi, restless and lonely, moves in with Emilia, a generous and incredible “cousin”, the children have a new adorable (but somehow familiar) aunt, while Emilia and Rita – now friends and allies – create an NGO to help anguished women find their missing husbands and sons. Love even blossoms for Emilia with a distraught widow (a wonderful Adriana Paz).

Invariably, there are non-melody complications in everyone’s quest for joy. In “Emilia Pérez,” as in many of Audiard’s films, new life, however emboldening, is just a pattern of waiting until the past comes roaring back. It is therefore not surprising that a filmmaker as sensitive to tenderness and violence as Audiard found the stuff of his metaphor-laden genre dreams in the story of a trans queen emerging from a shell toxic masculine. All of this comes through in the dark, urban allure of Paul Guilhaume’s cinematography, especially as it plays out on the faces of his leading ladies, transforming skin into an ambient palette, polishing all the musical interludes.

Zoe Saldaña in the film “Emilia Pérez”.

(Netflix)

But none of this would work without the mastery of this casting rightly honored at Cannes. Gomez’s prickly character seems like an asset that films should favor, and Gascón’s sultry, charged portrayal wouldn’t be out of place anchoring the film noir of a classic Hollywood woman. But the real coup de grace is Saldaña, a compassionate audience surrogate and urgent source of energy. Musicals — good and imaginative, like “Emilia Pérez” — have a way of propelling underappreciated talents into the stratosphere, and in a sequence like the harsh, dazzling number from “El Mal,” in which she cuts through a scorn – Fully packed through a benefit gala of rich hypocrites, it’s easy to believe that Saldaña might be the most versatile movie actor around.