Emilia Pérez Is an Exuberant Ode to Human Possibility

Very rarely does the right movie arrive at precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion appears to be in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated. Jacques Audiard’s operatic musical Emilia Pérez is the story of a disillusioned lawyer working in Mexico, Zoe Saldaña's Rita, who’s almost too successful for her own good. She has just successfully defended a media mogul accused of murdering his wife, though she knows he's guilty. But before her self-loathing can solidify into a comfortable habit, she gets a phone call—a mysterious, growly entity wants to meet with her. She’s whisked, blindfolded, to a secret location, where the gruff leader of a drug cartel, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, face a map of tough-guy tattoos, outlines a delicate but lucrative mission for her. Manitas wants to transition to living as a woman and wants Rita to arrange both the surgery and subsequent disappearance. Rita pulls it off: It takes a few years, but Manitas re-emerges into the world as the person she always knew she needed to be. She is now Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón plays both roles), free to live life as she chooses. Rita, well compensated as promised, runs off to London to live the high life. She thinks her mission is over, though it’s really only just beginning.

In fiction, and sometimes even in real life, it's too easy to view the fulfillment of a dream—having a wedding ring slipped onto your finger, overcoming great odds to earn a college degree, maybe even undergoing gender-affirmation surgery—as a happy ending. But after Emilia gets exactly what she wants, then she asks, Now what? Emilia Pérez is a story not about personal fulfillment but about personal responsibility, the “what happens next?” after you become the person you were destined to be.

If you set a Douglas Sirk movie in modern Mexico, and added singing and dancing, you might come up with something like Emilia Pérez, which is now streaming on Netflix. Audiard drew the screenplay from an opera libretto he’d written, adapted loosely from a novel by French author Boris Razon, Écoute. (The film was shot entirely in France, on faux-Mexico sets.) The plot turns may feel zany at first, but once you get into the movie’s groove, they come to make perfect emotional sense. When Rita first meets Emilia, four years after she and Manitas have parted ways, she of course doesn’t recognize her. The menacing, muscular thug she’d met earlier—who was, even so, a doting family man, devoted to his two kids and their mother, Jessi, played by Selena Gomez—is now a vixen with a seductive, throaty voice. Rita had already helped get Manitas’ family settled in Switzerland; having no knowledge of their patriarch's secret, they believe him to be dead. But now Emilia has another request for Rita, one that’s almost more challenging, and more dangerous, than the first. Emilia wants to make amends for the suffering she caused in her old life; she also longs to reconnect with her family. And because no one can escape loneliness, she yearns for companionship, too. She meets a woman whose scrappy spirit matches her own, Epifanía (Adriana Paz, in a warm, radiant performance), though that relationship also comes with its own complications.

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Audiard orchestrates the craziness of the plot with the assurance of an ace conductor. The musical numbers are exuberant, extravagant in feeling, without being overly polished. This isn’t a movie about showing off how much money you’ve spent but about how willing you are to go for broke. And it’s fantastic to see Saldaña—who, long ago, played a rebellious ballerina in Nicholas Hytner’s Center Stage, the sort of girl who extinguishes a cigarette butt on the pavement with one stomp of her dainty pink toeshoe—sing and dance in a vehicle worthy of her. “El Mal” is a Bollywood-inflected number decrying the hypocrisy of people who are happy to show up at a fancy benefit dinner even as, in their everyday lives, they have no qualms about killing those who stand in their way. Saldaña prowls through the song with angry swagger. Rita is a complex character: she has principles, but she’s also motivated by money. There’s nothing goody-goody about her. Saldaña makes those dimensions feel believable and real.

It's kismet that Saldaña somehow found her way into a Jacques Audiard movie. There’s no easy way to categorize his filmmaking career: over the years he’s made, to cover just three examples, a gorgeous melodrama about two people clawing their way out of tough circumstances (Rust and Bone), a bold and inventive western (The Sisters Brothers), a gritty romance about a crook who dreams of becoming a pianist (The Beat That My Heart Skipped). Actually, the idea of “dreaming of becoming” is probably the key to most of Audiard’s movies, and certainly to Emilia Pérez. He has discovered a great star to bring his ideas to life. Gascón, who was born and raised near Madrid, is in her early fifties; she transitioned at age 46, and she has spent the bulk of her career acting in Mexican telenovelas. In Emilia Pérez, she’s incandescently alive. As Manitas, she shows us a man who’s more than ready to give up his macho authority—he makes his case, piercingly, in the delicate but resolute “Deseo”—though we’ll later see that a tendency to manipulate others still lingers in Emilia’s character. She’s lots of things at once, because all humans are. Gascón’s performance is bold, assertive, but also blazingly tender. There’s a Mildred Pierce–style practicality about her, though she can also be as sultry-sunny as Lana Turner. She has a knack for putting us in touch with big emotions, no matter how much we might want to push them away.

As it turns out, roughly half the country is now having to work through some big emotions they’d rather not have to feel. In the 1990s, in the more liberal corners of the United States, you couldn’t pass more than three Honda Accords without seeing a “Practice Random Acts of Kindness” bumper sticker. Even those who cherished liberal ideals would roll their eyes: that kind of sloganeering was for people who made their own granola, who could find a peace march to join every weekend. They probably had a composting pile. And like many bromides, it could mean different things to different people: a white-supremacist granny who goes out of her way to make cookies for a bereaved neighbor might think she’s fully in compliance.

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But at the risk of dropping a bomb from the water-is-wet department: Boy, has the world changed. Or at least our view of it in the United States. Emilia Pérez premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last May; it won the Jury Prize, and its four women actors, Gascón, Saldaña, Gomez, and Paz, took home a combined Best Actress award. I saw the film first in Cannes and again in early fall, before the election. And while most people I knew liked it, or at least derived some pleasure from it, I had a conversation with two people who despised it, claiming it didn’t accurately represent the experience of trans individuals at all.

Though it's impossible, obviously, for a movie to reflect the experiences of a nonmonolithic group of people, lived experience certainly counts for something when we’re talking about art. No one has to like, or approve of, anything, for artistic reasons or any other. But the very existence of Emilia Pérez—and the fact that so many people have already responded to it—means something different in late fall 2024 than it did in May. Even many well-meaning, liberal-thinking Americans have tended to tiptoe delicately around the issue of trans rights, constantly in fear of offending or mistakenly using the wrong terminology. Now that those rights are even more imperiled than before, a movie like Emilia Pérez—one that, instead of pleading for trans acceptance merely treats it as a given—feels even more like movie fireworks, fierce and glorious, a radical act of the imagination with kindness in its heart. Audiard’s film is a challenge to find the beginning that comes after the end. It’s not about trans possibility, but about human possibility. Because they’re one and the same.