Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez
Running Time: 132 minutes
Running Time: 132 minutes
Synopsis: In Mexico, lawyer Rita Castro (Zoe Saldana) is recruited by drug cartel leader Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) to arrange his transition to a woman. Rita travels the world and finds the right surgeon, allowing Manitas to fake his death and become Emilia Pérez. Manitas' wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) believes her husband is dead and relocates with her children to Switzerland. Four years later, Emilia reconnects with Rita and again asks for help: this time to move Jessi and the children back to Mexico, with Emilia pretending to be Manitas' distant cousin. Remorseful of her past, Emilia also launches a charity and finds love, but jealousy will challenge her happiness.
What Works Well: Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard creates an audacious hybrid of crime, regret, redemption, and subterfuge, all with musical underpinnings. The tone is serious, creating song beats that are more menacing than joyous, as the former cartel leader navigates a mazy money-can-buy-anything path towards fulfillment. The drama dives deep into emotional complexities at the intersection of survival and identity, including parental love clashing with selfishness and jealousy. Zoe Saldana as Rita (bitterly tempted by career shortcuts) and Selena Gomez as Jessi (raw and disoriented) deliver standout performances.
What Does Not Work As Well: The musical interludes only work in patches, and at their worst disintegrate into excruciatingly awful lyrics and painfully bad singing. The failure to demonstrate the scale of Manitas' pre-transition brutality artificially tilts sympathy towards a monster.
Key Quote:
Surgeon: So. Does your client have a name?
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