Emilia Pérez Review: Karla Sofia Gascón powers silly, scatterbrained musical

What do the overt effects of the transitioning imply for Manitas? With sex-affirmation surgery, the coarse, gruff Manitas, full of violent streaks, turns into Emilia (a blazing Karla Sofia Gascón, illuminating the film’s pathos), a wholly different individual coursing with affection, newfound tenderness and generosity for any aggrieved stranger. The director pumps in so many convenient plot situations for the sake of dramatic tension it’s tough to look past. The narrative tries to get busier and tack on deceptions and layers of hiding, without sparing a moment’s rest or introspection. Even as Emilia rebuilds her life elsewhere, far from her family as was the plan, she yearns to see them again, be with her kids. So, she gets back in touch with Rita and asks her to orchestrate their reunion.

All it takes is a random mother’s anguish for her missing son to wholly set Emilia on a new life trajectory. She finds a sudden thrust of purpose. The surgery may have brought her the fulfilment of her deepest desires which she had to repress most of her life. But Audiard reinforces the same gendered binaries. Of course, becoming a woman, Emilia’s empathy levels have dramatically shot up. She displays an abrupt surge of concern for the disappearances in her nation that’s been happening for more than a decade.

Emilia is this social evangelist figure, a relentless crusader for the wronged. Her mission is peculiar, the moral compromises undergirding it many, self-defeating and amusing. She wants to bring justice for all those who have been killed in cartel wars. She must be having remorse over her own past role in the violence, but the film is uninterested in exploring her personhood beyond the maternal. What is it that affects Emilia so deeply about the disappearances that she pivots her entire life to undo or rather course-correct some of the damages of her empire? Audiard is besotted with stylised numbers fitted into the mould of the everyday, tackling prejudice and power abuse, distancing himself further and further from any real, touching enquiries into selfhood. This is an unabashed, chaotic musical, increasingly distended from complex, heaving inner lives. Songs here, like in any musical, serve to express characters’ unspoken truths and aches and uncertainties. But the effect is too externalizing. Audiard spins largely among three women in the film, without a caring, considered grasp of any.

Emilia’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), can’t recognize it’s her. All Jessi gets is to contend with a love interest that is fated to never be requited. Audiard demands sky-high suspension of disbelief. The film is stacked with jarring, bizarre turns that often feel imposed than springing from an organic, internally truthful reality. It aspires for a smooth shift in Emilia’s awakened social consciousness. But there’s not an ounce of conviction and palpable truth in the film, whenever it finds time to breathe and connect dots between frantic numbers. Yet, the most soulful, emotionally ringing song in the film emanates from the softest, quietest moments of Emilia inching towards love and intimacy. Passion and sensuality gleam more vividly here than in any of the larger, hysterical, hyper-consciously choreographed numbers. These are just a handful in the otherwise bloated, gratingly patchy film, one that never gives the grace of attention to any of its women. Overwhelmingly, Audiard abandons the characters, consigning them to wretched arcs of glory, redemption and ruin, fixating on frenetic interludes that situate characters’ scars only superficially.

Emilia Pérez is too impatient a film, lurching from one plot point to the other without a unified logic. Its tonal defiance strikes as more arbitrary than mapped with detail or insight. Its recklessness looms bigger and more troublingly when you take into account its willfully misplaced notions about trans identity. Audiard props up the trans character with an exaggerated idealization of the feminine, only to crucify her eventually. Beneath all the extravagance and show, this film is stuffed with dated, damaging ideas, holding no radical appeal.

Emilia Perez is streaming on Mubi.