Jacques Audiard’s incredible run from Read My Lips through The Sisters Brothers cemented his place as one of the true modern greats, and he had much to risk when he stepped out of his comfort zone to make the latter—his first film in English. His prior work was always highly nuanced, and filmmakers working in another tongue often lose the subtleties of that language. Happily, Audiard delivered the goods with The Sisters Brothers—a sublime western starring Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly that can proudly sit alongside his contemporary classics Dheepan, Rust and Bone, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet. Audiard finally dropped the ball with his next effort, the Céline Sciamma–penned Paris, 13th District—but in all fairness, he was long overdue a bad film.
Following that misstep, Audiard once again worked outside his native language with Emilia Pérez, a film whose initial release—a brief theatrical run before it landed on Netflix, who had won a fierce bidding war for the rights—was met with great enthusiasm until controversy surrounding its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, severely damaged its status as an Oscar frontrunner (only two of its 13 nominations resulted in wins). Audiard’s film is one that will be remembered for all the wrong reasons, few of which have anything to do with its content. Indeed, if you saw the film before the backlash began, chances are you found something to admire in this truly audacious—if highly flawed—piece of filmmaking, one whose spectacular downfall saw it unwillingly dragged into the heart of the culture wars.
Emilia Pérez is undoubtedly the most outlandish of Audiard’s films. It’s a musical that centres on the title character (Gascón), a Mexican former cartel leader who starts a new life after undergoing gender reassignment surgery arranged by lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña). The onetime kingpin’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) has no idea what happened to her husband, who is desperate to reunite with their children and resurfaces as a woman claiming to be a distant cousin of the man Jessi married. Jessi doesn’t recognise Emilia, and, assuming her husband is gone for good, sets about reconnecting with her former lover Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez). Predictably, Jessi’s plans to set up home with Gustavo and the children do not sit well with Emilia, who returns to the world of violence she had vowed to leave behind.
It’s all even more preposterous than it sounds, but Audiard and his co-writers, Thomas Bidegain and Léa Mysius, somehow create a strangely compelling film from such an absurd outline. All of this is captured, quite magnificently, by Paris, 13th District cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, who also lensed his partner Mysius’ outstanding The Five Devils. Guilhaume’s work here helps immerse us in sun-drenched Mexico—though, remarkably, the film was actually shot on a Paris soundstage. Yet this handsomely mounted spectacle is far easier to admire than to enjoy, and its visceral impact is greatly diminished by the small screens on which most will view it. A swing and a miss from Jacques Audiard, then, but the pariah that is Emilia Pérez is never anything less than fascinating.
