Emilia Perez: A Drug Cartel Musical

This fringe Oscar contender resonates reasonably well with both critics and audiences. Which leads to the question street philosopher Ja Rule may ask one day: What does Hundred Tomatoes think of it?

NOTE: During the time of this review, Emilia Perez had not reached the level of polarization we see today. Hence the higher audience score and positive subheading in my review. Amazing what can change in a short period of time.

What do you get when you combine the following: a lawyer who questions the nature of her job, a drug cartel, a musical, transgender surgery, and a fan choice “runner up” honor at the Toronto International Film Festival? If you answered, “Emilia Perez”, you would be right on the money. Famous French director Jacques Audiard’s story follows the journey of three women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness. The fearsome cartel leader Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists Rita (Zoe Saldaña), an unappreciated lawyer stuck in a dead-end job, to help fake her death so that Emilia can finally live authentically as her true self.

Will this musical flawlessly hit an A above high C, or get laughed out of the room like a painful American Idol audition? Before delving into those details, let’s look at what those wannabes over at Rotten Tomatoes are saying:

Critic Score: 80% Certified Fresh

Critic Synopsis: a swaggering musical crime thriller of genre-bending fascination that is also an unapologetically trans story

Audience Score: 79% Fresh

Audience Synopsis: High praise of Zoe Saldana’s acting performance, along with the creative nature of the film. The occasional review complains about the acting from Selena Gomez, and the singing in the musical numbers.

Very rarely do both the critics and audiences end up with this little of a discrepancy in scores. However, sometimes, everyone is wrong. Remember when people thought the sun revolved around the Earth, and not the other way around? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Is “Emilia Perez” this another Galileo moment in the making? The only way to find out, is to read the full Hundred Tomatoes review. 

Spoiler Alert: I will potentially discuss specific scenes from the movie that may unveil certain plot points. If you do not want anything revealed, you can quickly scroll to our “TL; DR” synopsis at the end, along with our official score out of, you guessed it, ONE HUNDRED TOMATOES. If you are wondering where to watch this, you can find it on Netflix.

Without further ado, let’s go to the review!

“The only thing predictable about life, is its unpredictability” –  Brad Bird, screenwriter for Disney Pixar’s “Ratatouille”.

Why do I start this review with that quote? Because if someone said to me a few months ago that I would find myself watching a musical predominantly in Spanish made by a Frenchman about a transgender (Karla Sofia Gascon) drug lord who collaborates with a disgruntled lawyer (Zoe Saldana) to help live life to the fullest whilst ensuring the safety of that same person’s existing family, I would have told them to put down the bowl of crack. Yet here we are. The 97^th Oscar season certainly does not fail to bring its fair share of eccentric movies.

Enter Jacques Audiard’s newest work, “Emilia Perez”. It showcases no shortage of artistically dramatic twists. It certainly deserves praise for its ambitious attempt to create something uniquely memorable. With that said, bold visions like these can often leave bitter tastes in the mouths of moviegoers. Is that the case here? Let’s get into the good, the bad and the interesting.

Immediately when thinking about this film, Zoe Saldana’s acting performance stands out immaculately. She excellently expresses the demons of someone who feels morally compromised by the nature of their job. Her nonverbal communication conveys a story within itself. You almost feel like you can envision the character’s entire life just by looking at her play out the scenes she plays a part in. As a result, her character comes across as not only the most relatable, but one you can sympathize with to an extent as everything goes along. This is not to mention her vocal capabilities (which are deceptively solid) and the way she pulls of the choreography in some of the musical bits. Without a doubt, her performance is the pinnacle of this entire movie.

Along with Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon, who plays the role of Emilia Perez, shows flashes of excellence throughout. It requires a “before and after” contrast not easy to pull off, but she does so while maintaining a believable range. From a character development perspective, some of the decisions made, especially near the end, make me scratch my head, but Gascon leans into those decisions well, selling the believability of her actions in a comprehensible way.

From an aesthetics standpoint, the editing immediately comes to mind. Due to the arthouse nature of this film, they need to combine various pieces of footage to showcase the symbolism they wish to depict in the movie. So many of the musical numbers require cutaways or other elements to bring it all together. To their credit, almost every scene transitions seamlessly. Everything goes extremely smoothly. The cinematography also deserves a shoutout for that reason. Only one scene in the entire movie comes across as choppy to me. That is a testament to the way they meld everything together in coherent fashion.

Both the costume design and production design bring in some interesting elements that add a flair to the firm. However, due to the grittier tone of “Emilia Perez”, sometimes it gets lost in the mix. The large amount of night scenes, along with duller environments detracts from their ability to make everything fully pop on screen. They do let their creativity shine in certain scenes, which really stick out to me.

While Gascon and Saldana electrify, I cannot say the same for other members of the cast. Audiences absolutely eviscerate Selena Gomez for her role in this film as the wife of the cartel drug lord prior to the transition from male to female. I agree with some of the critiques: her emotional scenes are nothing to write home about (though I did not find them to be bad by any stretch of the imagination). What ultimately irks me about the whole performance, is that she never gets a chance to showcase her true singing talents.

At the end of the day, I fault the director’s vision more than Selena Gomez herself. Why you do not utilize the talents of someone with multiple Billboard Hot 100 songs more boggles the mind. You’re not going to give her at least one opportunity to belt a tune or show off her range (assuming she has range and is not completely autotuned in all her music)? Really? In the words of legendary comedian Tim Robinson, “YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?”

Of course, I would be remiss to talk about a musical and not discuss the songs or choreography that comes along with that. The attempt at making a grittier, more realistic musical deserves praise. You can tell that they want to avoid many of the stereotypes people have of movies with intermittent singing spread throughout it. From a choreography perspective, they nicely create dance numbers in the background of several songs without detracting from the flow of the movie. It is one of the best aspects of the film. Those moments allow for the aesthetics to shine brightly.

With that in mind, some of the songs jumble together in forgettable fashion. Other times they are not even sung well, to the point where it makes me wonder if they put certain musical elements in because they feel like they need to include some singing to break up the action for the sake of breaking up the action. Luckily, Saldana and Gascon possess decent voices, and they end up singing in a solid portion of the musical numbers. Aside from the song in the trailer (which admittedly is a powerful one), I can only remember one other song positively. I can recall all the choreography quite well, however.

The film tries to cover a lot of ground theme wise over the course of two hours and twelve minutes. Because of that, at times, the writing at times can come across as heavy-handed. For example, the main character, Emilia Perez, spends the brunt of the first act telling Saldana’s character about the desire to become a woman. But we never get any proper exposition that would help us understand why this would be the case. This takes away from the viewers ability to sympathize with the character and get emotionally invested in the journey that comes with it. The various romance plots seem to fall into this trap as well. I am a big fan of the “show, don’t tell” mantra, but too often I find this film likes to follow the “tell, don’t show” motto. As a result, I get taken out of the magic of the movie from time to time. I chalk this aspect up to wanting to explore too many avenues, with too little time.

While some message explorations fall flat with me (they try to commentate on human trafficking, drug cartels, and transgenders all in one film which is WILD), one theme creates some especially intriguing food for thought: what would people say about you when they think you are dead? Due to the transition, Emilia Perez presents herself as a relative to the wife and the kids’ father. She gets a firsthand look into how they change over time, their fond memories of their Dad, and even gets some insight from the wife on her true thoughts of their marriage. The scenes between Emilia Perez and her kids unaware of the transition (though they hint at it in the other musical number I quite enjoy), create some powerful moments. This aspect of the movie where the main character essentially lives a double life fascinates me.

All in all, Jacques Audiard deserves some applause for this ambitious vision. Although I wish certain musical numbers utilize better vocals and feel like they try to explore too much in too little time, the acting from the two main characters, along with undeniably impressive choreography and creativity, leaves a lasting impression. You can interpret that however you like.

 TL;DR Synopsis: An ambitious film with solid acting from its main characters that shows flashes of brilliance, but ultimately bites off more than it can chew.

HT Score: 60/100 Tomatoes

Oscar Watch:

Will “Emilia Perez” get nominated for the coveted “Best Picture” at the Oscars? My guess is it will likely get nominated. However, if it does, it will do so as a fringe nominee, and not as a serious contender to win. There are just one too many flaws that go along with this film that will prevent Academy members from voting it in their upper echelons. With that said, the following seem like logical categories for potential nominations:

Best Director: I wish he used Selena Gomez’s talents better, but there is no denying that Jacques Audiard deserves a nomination for this bold vision of a movie.

Best Actress: Karla Sofia Gascon puts on a great, emotional performance. One of the best of the year. She will be in tough competition with Mikey Madison from “Anora” though.

Best Supporting Actress: While I question whether she is a main character or supporting character, Zoe Saldana absolutely electrifies. Should they choose to nominate her for this category, I could totally see her winning this award.

Best Adapted Screenplay: Personally, I find the screenplay too heavy handed at times. With that said, from a writing perspective, there is a ton of work that goes into crafting the musical numbers, and the way they use those musical numbers to advance the plot requires creativity at the very least worthy of a nomination.

Best Cinematography: The shots they capture in this movie captivate.

Best Editing: I absolutely love the smoothness this film possesses and think it could sneak in the editing category as a result.

Best Score: It’s a musical, it only makes sense for a score nomination to occur.

Best Song: I don’t know which one will make it, but I would be shocked if one of them does not make it