Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Emilia Perez’ on Netflix, a Wild, Nutty Musical Melodrama About a Trans Cartel Boss and Her Loyal Lawyer

By John Serba

One of the bigger swings you’re likely to see this year is Emilia Perez (now streaming on Netflix), which will test your powers of suspension of disbelief even more than most other musicals do. Jacques Audiard directs this unusual song-and-dance soap-operatic saga starring Zoe Saldana as a lawyer who helps Karla Sofia Gascon’s cartel boss start a new life. Note that said description finds me using grand reductionism, because the premise of the film – which won ensemble-acting and Jury Prize awards at Cannes, making Gascon the first openly trans actress to win such an award – is pretty bonkers. Bonkers enough that I sense some will love it and others will find it a bit too much, although I’d argue its too-muchness is exactly the reason to appreciate it.

EMILIA PEREZ: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It seems that Rita (Saldana) has compromised herself. She’s a lawyer who just helped a creep who murdered his wife escape conviction. The justice system in Mexico is corrupt. Easily manipulated. And she works within it, skillfully crafting horse-manure arguments that put sleazebags back into society. Her conscience may be getting the best of her. Or maybe it isn’t? Maybe she’d be happier doing this if she wasn’t playing second-fiddle to a showboating attorney who seems to be making a lot more money? Which might explain why Rita does what she does next: She takes a call from an unknown person with a vague proposition and the promise of making her very rich, and she doesn’t say no. Red flag! But she doesn’t see it (or chooses to ignore it) and as she tentatively approaches the designated meeting place, some goons snatch her and put a sack over her head and drive her far into the countryside. Heed the red flags, people, heed the red flags.

But Rita’s general discontent with her lot in life put her in a nothing-to-lose/everything-to-gain type situation – although by the time they pull the sack off and she sees herself surrounded by a near-militarized drug cartel operation, she might be real close to losing everything. She’s plopped down across from Manitas (Gascon), who very much looks the part of a criminal boss: face tats, gold teeth, intimidating tone. He saw how skillfully Rita got the wife-killer set free, and figures she’s up for an enormous task. Namely, devising and executing a plan that’ll allow him to fake his own death, have his long-desired gender-reassignment surgery and then start a new life with all the vast piles of money from his old life. Rita’s lucky she’s in a bit of a transitional period and open to new opportunities, because the vibe here is, 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 gig involves relocating Manitas’ beloved wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two sons to Switzerland, and finding a doctor of slippery ethics willing to the surgery. Done and done. Can’t say Rita ain’t good at her job – so good, she finishes the job, gets her couple million bucks and finds herself in a fancy restaurant in London four years later. One among the dinner party is Emilia Perez, who we know is the Person Formerly Known as Manitas, since this movie shifts perspectives frequently, and we had just spent some time hanging with the him that is now a her. It seems obvious to us, but it takes Rita a minute to figure it out. Emilia pulls Rita aside and offers her another gig: Get Jessi and the boys back to Mexico. Emilia misses her family so very much. But she can’t reveal her true identity to Jessi, so she’ll have to pass as a long-lost aunt. 

And it works! Possibly because Jessi is blind, or maybe she didn’t know her spouse that well in the first place? I guess it isn’t impossible, right? Emilia also will have to find something to do with her time, so the Gods of Ironic Redemption have her partner with Rita to establish a nonprofit org that helps families of missing persons find their loved ones, or at least what’s left of them. And that works too! Possibly because a key person in the org knows some people who knows some people who know where a lot of bodies are buried. Oh, and I failed to mention that everyone’s been bursting into song and/or dance this whole time. Possibly because that’s the only way to make this plot contextually plausible, at least within the realms of fantastical fiction.

Photo: Netflix

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Emilia Perez is what might happen if Pedro Almodovar directed Mrs. Doubtfire. (It also has me wondering if 2024 is the Year of the Big Swing, considering how this, Megalopolis and The Substance have so fearlessly challenged us.)

Performance Worth Watching: Simply put, if Gascon doesn’t draw us in with a powerful and subtly complex performance, the whole thing likely falls apart. Quickly.

Memorable Dialogue: On the far end of this plot, Jessi calls Manitas’ voicemail to hear his voice then utters this doozy to herself: “My pussy still hurts when I think of you.”

Sex and Skin: Nothing notable.

Photo: PAGE 114 – WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS – PATHÉ FILMS – FRANCE 2 CINÉMA

Our Take: Emilia Perez is a deeply flawed endeavor. The plot is preposterous, the characters are shallow, the songs are so-so and it’s tonally mushy. But Audiard makes you feel like you’ve just watched a FILM, a singular exhilaration that tends to push aside one’s misgivings. I hate to speculate about a filmmaker’s intent, but absurdity may be the point here; my struggle to pin down this slippery, fascinating film ultimately was an asset. It kept me compelled, and on my toes. And visually, it’s rangy and ambitious, leaning into the story’s over-the-top theatrics, splitting screens, moving the camera dynamically, staging musical sequences uninterested in the usual grandiose song-and-dance aesthetics. 

I hesitate to read any further into the film’s setting or politics – its ironies give us plenty of 800-lb. bears to wrestle with, and subtlety isn’t its strong suit. Interestingly, Audiard reconstructed Mexico City on soundstages in his native France, giving a fascinating layer of artifice to a film primarily about artifice itself, a film that sure seems to be winking at us from beneath a thick layer of Greek-tragedy overtures. Few other movies have the audacity to piece together sudsy melodrama, a bracing shootout and a Selena Gomez karaoke sequence (among other borderline-nutso stuff) into the same movie and actually make at least a modicum of sense as a single piece of art.

Again, to watch it is to stand on shifting sands. There’s no true protagonist here; although the narrative might lean more toward Saldana as the lead in terms of pure run time, the vast majority of the emotional drama is couched in Gascon’s performance. You sense Emilia’s inner conflict just enough, and that psychology points to an inevitable dramatic reveal or reckoning. You’ll wish it was funnier, and Audiard fails the character somewhat with a conclusion that peters out instead of packing a wallop. But by then, we’ve seen plenty of things we haven’t seen before, and the euphoric feeling accompanying such things is something to be cherished. Picking apart this enjoyably audacious movie would be no fun at all.

Our Call: Audacity and inventiveness are Emilia Perez’s powers – and those powers sometimes border on being super. STREAM IT.

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