There are no rules. You can make a musical about absolutely anything. Brexit, JeremyCorbyn and Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski trial have all had the treatment recently. Just tell ’em to burst into song, right?
However, a Spanish-language musical directed by a Frenchman, a gender reassignment story made by a straight guy, and set in the milieu of Mexican drug cartels has got the alarm bells firing off all at once. But somehow, Jacques Audiard has totally pulled off what could have been (after the misadventure of Joker: Folie à Deux) this month’s second musical, er, folly.
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Emilia Pérez is a hip-swaggering, trigger-clicking, scalpel-wielding work of weird brilliance. And to boot, it comes with a hearty message about loving yourself and living your own true path (there is a song three-quarters of the way through to remind you of this).
Rita (Zoë Saldaña, absolutely riveting from the start) is a junior lawyer who’s operating way above her pay grade, writing the dazzling closing statements for her boss to deliver and smash every courtroom trial. Then she receives a proposition out of blue (the black sack pulled over her head is a signal that it’s an offer she can’t refuse).
Her can-do talents are demanded by Manitas, a notorious cartel boss who simply wants Rita to... “turn him into a woman”. “I’m a lawyer not a surgeon,” is her pithy comeback. Manitas clearly wants a way out of the brutally bloody drug trade, but more than that he’d like to spend the final decades of his life living as the woman he’s always felt he truly is.
Cue Rita jetting off first class around the globe on the cartel plastic to find the right doctor for the job, which sets up one of the film’s few traditionally choreographed song-and-dance routines (“Vaginoplasty makes the man happy!” belt out the nurses in smiling synchronicity as they wheel beds around a Bangkok clinic).
No spoilers on the success of the transition, but Karla Sofía Gascón (who this year became the first trans woman to win a best actress prize at Cannes) plays both Manitas and Emilia, so it’s safe to say the cartel’s cash was well-spent.
This is a swirling, swooning, grand saga though, so Emilia certainly isn’t going to live a life of happily-ever-after obscurity. She’s going to miss her children, who are living with their mother Jessi (Selena Gomez), intensely.
Also, as a woman (one of the film’s major takeaways, perhaps), Emilia feels much more pain and remorse for Manitas’s crimes than he ever did, which brings her into the arms of one of his victims, Epifiana (Adriana Paz).
Audiard has an impeccable pedigree of classy movie-making (from 2005’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped to A Prophet in 2009 and 2015’s Dheepan, the latter two both big winners at Cannes), and he knows how to deal with crime in naturalistic yet effortlessly stylish way.
But transgender subjects? And musicals? He handles both with enormous sensitivity. Without giving away too much, you will weep with Emilia. And cleverly, the musical numbers aren’t really “numbers”. Most (and there aren’t too many) begin with the actor just gently sing-songing their lines, and thankfully never develop into full-on affairs. It also helps that they were written by wonderfully off-kilter French singer Camille.
All the moving parts (or rather, the incredible performances from the four leads, who shared the best actress prize at Cannes) come together in a fittingly poetic and moving spectacle of a finale – all dancing pick-up truck headlights and bullets in the desert night.
It's a gloriously original tribute to anyone who truly dares to go their own way, but particularly the amazing women who do it under extreme fire.
