‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdance | Telluride

French auteur Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez took the Cannes Film Festival by storm, winning the Jury Prize as well as the Best Actress award, shared by the four talented women at the core of the story. – The film’s astonishingly original and gripping storytelling, its universal themes of identity—both individual and collective—and its unapologetic tone shifts make Emilia Pérez one of the best films in years.

We open late at night in Mexico City, with an itinerant vendor truck roaming the streets blaring a song loudly, the “we buy mattress…or whatever else you have that is made of old iron” tune that is well-known to the denizens of North America’s largest city. This is a very niche piece of modern Mexican culture, one that few audiences are likely to understand. The song represents, for the most part, the continued scrappiness of Mexicans, our ability and willingness to retrofit old items and rediscover their identity. And it has also been retrofitted itself of late, as a hymn to women who literally take up iron to destroy the old shackles that have bound them. In other words, this admittedly strange opening sequence will go unperceived by the uninitiated. But Audiard and his masterful script are not doing anything by accident. This subtle but meaningful beginning is a clear harbinger of the iron-wielding women who are to come.

Next we see one of the film’s principal characters, lawyer Rita played by a stupendous Zoe Saldaña in a career best performance. Rita is overworked and underpaid, living in a dark, cramped apartment. Worse, she is preparing the closing argument to a jury in a murder trial, to wrongly convince them that her client is wrongly accused of murdering his wife. To add insult to injury, her boss is about to take credit for the acquittal.

But something strange then happens during this jury address. Rita breaks out into song, as do the majority of the Mexico City street urchins and vagabonds that surround her. With loud stomps, flashing lights, and cutting arm thrusts, Emilia Pérez announces itself loudly in its first three minutes. It grips you by the shirt, drawing you closer, and never lets go. Are we about to watch Chicago? Traffic? Who knows.

The reality is: you have never seen anything like this movie before.

Soon Rita receives a mysterious phone call and finds herself tasked with the unorthodox assignment of helping an infamous drug kingpin complete gender affirming surgery, not only to escape the authorities but to affirm her own identity as a woman. It would be criminal to give away too much more of the plot beyond these opening moments. Suffice it to say that kingpin’s two boys and wife Jessi, played by an electric, impressive Selena Gomez, also become part of Rita’s ongoing assignment. So too do the chores later doled out by the titular Emilia Pérez, played by the actress Karla Sofía Gascón, the first trans actress to win a Best Actress prize at Cannes. Another drug dealer, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez), becomes part of their lives in the third act, as does Epifanía (Adriana Paz) as Emilia’s girlfriend.

What follows is infinitely more complex than even this complicated plot suggests. Emilia Pérez quickly exposes itself as a genre-bending, genre-defying work of genius. It and its songs (by the French singer Camille) can go from lifting you up to scaring you within moments. They advance the plot at times, while at others simply adding layers of depth to the movie’s memorable characters. The film ambulates between the farcical—think of a song called “Vaginoplasty” and danced by a group of Thai doctors in a neon-filled operation room—and the touching—such as songs about fatherhood, motherhood, and longing, suffused with the embrace of a child or a long-lost lover. The movie can and will make you cry as the women at its core pass through various stages of grief and loneliness, frustration, and self-discovery. It will also thrill you and keep you at the edge of your seat as the drug cartel motif may suggest.

Much of what makes Emilia Pérez great is Audiard’s searching camera and how it extracts every last ounce of considerable talent from these magnificent women. Most impressive is how each of them conveys in their first scene precisely what their character is all about. For Saldaña, devoted and determined as Rita, it is anger, the anger of years of sexism, of being unable to scale a slippery ladder of Mexican corruption and societal inequality. For Gascón, emotional and also forceful as Emilia, it is sadness, the sadness that comes with feeling like a half of something, and therefore a total nothing. For Gomez, shockingly perhaps the film’s best actress, it is her sinister nature, that which is needed for a woman to survive in a world of violent men. And for Paz as Epifanía it is, as her name may suggest, the realization that one can do something about one’s own plight. These characters are all terrifying and likeable instantaneously, infinitely multifaceted. Again, film has scarcely seen anything quite like them.

There are other themes that appear as the story unfolds, all told with equal magnanimity as the emotional core that belongs to each character. A principal subplot delves into Mexico’s intractable problem of violence and disappeared victims. The suffering of these victims and their families’ need for closure, all tell us about the intractable nature of aggression, the impossibility of fully ridding a culture, or a person, of abuse. How does an individual or a nation forge a new identity for the future when the scars of the past remain unresolved? How do they heal when the stubborn ghoul of class division and inequality refuses to be killed?

Wrapping all of this with a bow is Paul Guilhaume’s colorful yet dark cinematography. It not only transitions seamlessly to light back from darkness when the characters have broken into personal song, it navigates neon, dirt roads, and vast expanses mostly in shadows, except perhaps for the brief and ephemeral moments in these women’s lives in which there is some light. Notable also is the crisp editing by Juliette Welfling, needed to further the film’s urgent tone, as if someone was consistently snapping their fingers to keep the action moving along.

By the time Emilia Pérez is over, you will have seen an exacting analysis of modern Mexican society, and a thoughtful study about the search for and the affirmation of identity. So it is only fitting that Audiard closes out the film like he began it, with a processional song about the spiritual power of powerful women. It is a beautiful, symbolic final number, full of virgins and flowers, all essential ingredients of Mexican identity. Only this time, the melody is not the promise of women who will fit oppression with iron. It is a hymn to women who have come and gone, lifting our spirits and helping us improbably find healing, before ultimately departing.

Grade: A

This review is from the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. Netflix will release Emilia Pérez in select theaters in the U.S. and Canada on November 1 and on Netflix November 13.