‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Jacques Audiard’s Musical Is Crazy, But Also A Marvel – Cannes Film Festival

On paper, it looks mad as a loose wheel. A largely Spanish-language musical about a Mexican druglord having a sex change, featuring onetime Disney teen star Selena Gomez as a gangster’s wife: nobody could deny director and writer Jacques Audiard’s giddy determination to do something different, but how could Emilia Pérez be anything but a hot mess? But here is it is on the screen, a musical marvel. Of course it’s crazy, but Audiard has set up his impossible conjuring trick and made it work.

Emilia Pérez fires up immediately with an eccentric chanson about consumption – “we buy washing machines; we buy microwaves” – that literally sets the tone for what will follow. Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) would love to consume a little more; she is a junior barrister flatlining as her boss’ more capable helpmate. Her story is told swiftly: Saldaña delivers a deft dance with the office cleaning women, and a dynamic song in the courtroom about the moral quandary of defending a man who pushed his wife off their balcony. When a breathy call from a stranger suggests she could earn a good deal more money doing a job for him, it is easy enough to believe she would be tempted. As the cleaners sing in sprightly chorus, what does she have to lose?

Enter Manita Del Monte, the leader of a criminal cartel, for his future life. Manita has unthinkable amounts of money stashed in Swiss bank accounts but still likes to hang with his homies, drinking on old car seats somewhere out in the desert while his beloved children dance with his posse of killers. Nobody would mistake him for a woman. His voice is rasping, his beard disheveled and his approach to recruitment strikingly direct: he has his hombres put a bag over Rita’s head and kidnap her. Discretion must be enforced, given Manita’s incendiary secret. He has always wanted to be a woman. Now, having seen how resourceful Rita is in court, he wants her to help set him up with a sex change.

Not that it is just a sex change. As Emilia Pérez, Manita can become any kind of woman he wants. Influenced by Rita’s friendship, she becomes a public benefactor, presiding over an organization tracing the disappeared: people killed by cartels like the one she owned. Except that, as Emilia discovers, a leopard can change only so many spots. Years after her transition, she still longs for her children and is deter