Emilia Pérez movie storyline. Exhilarating and piercingly resonant, the latest from director Jacques Audiard audaciously merges pop opera, narco thriller, and gender affirmation drama. Emilia Pérez is a rollercoaster in which crime, redemption, and karma collide, featuring fearless performances from Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and the amazing Karla Sofía Gascón, an ensemble that collectively received the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival this year.
Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña) is a Mexico City defense attorney whose brilliant strategies have kept many murderous but wildly affluent clients out of jail. Her reputation draws the attention of Manitas Del Monte (Gascón), a notorious kingpin, who is secretly transitioning. He hires Rita to arrange an itinerary of under-the-table procedures with the world’s best surgeons, while making a plan for the wife (Gomez) and kids he’s leaving behind. The process is a success, Manitas’ murder is staged, and Emilia Pérez is born. This new identity affords Emilia the ability to create a whole new life for herself, but the past begins to creep back, threatening to undo everything she and Rita have worked so hard to achieve.
Written by Audiard with Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi, and Léa Mysius, with music by Camille and Clément Ducol, Emilia Pérez upends expectations with its ingenious plot twists, eye-popping spectacle, and inspired musical detours, which find the entire cast singing, rapping, and dancing as a means to express the dreams and anxieties of an entire culture struggling against corruption, fear, and harmful stereotypes.
Emilia Pérez is a 2024 Spanish-language French musical crime comedy film written and directed by Jacques Audiard, based on Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name, which was in turn loosely adapted from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Listen. It stars Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir and Édgar Ramírez. The original songs for the film were contributed by Camille, while its original score was provided by Clément Ducol. The choreographic sections of the film are designed by Damien Jalet.
The film premiered on May 18, 2024 at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, and was selected to compete for the Palme d’Or in its main competition section, where it won the Jury Prize and its female ensemble won the Best Actress award. It was theatrically released by Pathé on August 21, 2024. It was selected as the French entry for Best International Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
Film Review for Emilia Pérez
Audacity and ambition define Jacques Audiard. The veteran filmmaker’s latest creation, Emilia Perez, might not count as one of his best but is quite a trailblazer in more ways than one. It resists categorization; the traditional straitjacketing of genres entirely eludes it.
It is an edge-of-the-seat crime thriller, a riveting courtroom drama, an affecting family melodrama, a sentimental Latin American telenovela and most so a rambunctious Broadway musical, all rolled into one. Not to forget the gender and sexuality politics, however unformed, that Audiard throws in the mix. The versatile French maestro’s tenth film speaks in Spanish, is set in Mexico City, and takes him out of France to explore the Latin American culture on screen with a virtuoso cast of Spanish and Latin American actors and a trans actor playing the titular character.
Audiard tells it straight but with loads of style, colour and chutzpah and mounts it on a sweeping scale making Emilia Perez constantly entertaining and great fun even though flimsy and far-fetched. A case of Audiard letting himself loose in the Pedro Almodovar territory but not quite approximating his level of complexity in characterization and representation behind the veneer of style.
It is all about a violent world inhabited by drug cartels and the mafia. The film focuses on the drug lord Juan Manitas del Monte, married happily to Annie (Selena Gomez) with two young kids that he dotes on. In a seemingly bizarre turn of events for the macho man that he is, Manitas does something extraordinary. He decides to get away from his deadly business and sets out to chart a new course in life by embracing his secret inner self. He undergoes sex reassignment surgery to become a woman, Senora Emilia Perez (Karla Sofia Gascon).
To help him hatch his transition plan, Manitas kidnaps and enlists defence lawyer Rita Castro (Zoe Saldana), who is feeling stuck, suffocated and frustrated in a law firm that has little to do with justice, instead specialising in setting criminals scot-free. As offenders buy lawyers, killings are passed off for suicides, she wonders how long she will have to waste her talent and when will she get her deserved applause and monetary rewards. On the other hand, there are some more consequential questions. Will she help Manitas change his destiny, or will the karma catch up with him eventually?
As Rita goes about the task—from staging the fake death of Manitas to organising a surgeon, from getting her new identity documents to setting up a fresh home for Annie and her kids—the film moves geographies, from Mexico City to Tel Aviv to Switzerland and then back to Mexico City, in the blink of the eye. The outer change of appearance also harbours an inner change of heart.
With the guilt of young deaths due to Cartel crimes overwhelming a repentant Emilia, she goes about seeking atonement by setting up a charity to find their graves and bring relief and closure to their bereaved families. But will it absolve her of her past? A similar sense of overt virtue and morality imbues the film as well, especially in the extended yet facile take on transphobia and the sorority of women that it consciously subverts the typically male gangster narrative with. But without quite plumbing the depths, especially when it comes to the issue of transition. The “half-man, half-woman, half-papa, half-aunt” thing is nothing more than half-baked.
Audiard’s sixth film in the Cannes competition (which is now set to travel to the Toronto International Film Festival in September) did something unprecedented in Cannes, winning the best actress award for the entire cast of fabulous women, including Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana, Adriana Paz and Karla Sofia Gascon, the first trans actor to mark a Cannes win. The award was not just to celebrate the ensemble acting but to also acknowledge their musical talent that helps bring the catchy score of singer Camille and composer Clement Ducol and the energetic choreography of Damien Jalet to life. It’s the musical spectacle that truly makes this movie a roller coaster ride.
Emilia Pérez (2024)
Directed by: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, Édgar Ramírez, James Gerard, Agathe Bokja, Lucas Varoclier, Marie-Elisabeth Robert, Eric Geynes, Anabel Lopez
Screenplay by: Jacques Audiard
Production Design by: Emmanuelle Duplay
Cinematography by: Paul Guilhaume
Film Editing by: Juliette Welfling
Costume Design by: Virginie Montel
Set Decoration by: Sandra Castello, Cécile Deleu, Emmanuelle Duplay, Sandrine Jarron
Art Direction by: Virginie Montel
Music by: Clément Ducol (score), Camille (songs)
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Pathé
Release Date: May 18, 2024 (Cannes), August 21, 2024 (France)
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