Later this week a new musical film is hitting theaters, Emilia Pérez will hit select theaters for two weeks before it heads for a streaming release on Netflix. This Spanish language musical film can only be described as a gender confirming fever dream that wil lrequire you to read along to songs that seem placed sporatically throughout a story that is often disjointed.
The movie follows the lives of four women who’s lives are ultimately interwoven around one – Emilia Pérez. But things aren’t as simple as they seem on the onset. Rita (Zoe Saldaña) receives a mysterious call from a potential legal client who promises her riches. When she goes to the meet up point she is kidnapped and taken to the middle of no where, where she is finally introduced to her new client – a powerful man who runs a drug cartel. Her job? Help him get the gender affirming surgeries he’s always wanted and to make his previous life disappear. If only it were that easy.
Emilia Pérez spans over several years, and the character comes back into Rita’s life a few years later asking to have her children brought back into her life. Of course, that means her former wife (who believes herself a widow) comes back into her life as well. And while Emilia Pérez desires to be a mother to her children, she instead is now only known as their distant Aunt, who is helping raise them. The ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) is trying to start her life anew and finds love again while Emilia Pérez finds love in another woman she’s met through her charity work. It seems to be working until Jessi wants to get married and move away with her children – which Emilia wont stand for, as you see the violent tendencies of her past come back out again.
The women in Emilia Pérez life seem trapped in her orbit. Rita can’t have the career or life she wants and Jessi can’t have love or a life of her own. The only one that seems to be able to have a life she desires is Emilia herself and it will leaving you asking if Emilia Pérez desire to live her life how she wants is really enough to control and dictate the lives of every one else around her.
Emilia Pérez poses an interesting issue for a lot of non Spanish speaking audiences – reading the lyrics as the musical numbers are portrayed leaves you choosing between understanding the lyrics or watching the imagry on the screen. Do we choose to just watch the movie and try to understand the context, much like watching an old Germanic opera on a stage, or do we read the lyrics and miss out on important scenes in the story? I’m sure this isn’t a unique issue to this movie, or experience that non-native English speakers have felt before, but it takes you out of the movie, the story and almost makes you lose part of the production as it happens.
The movie has stunning visuals and is no doubt a piece of art film. The problem, of course, will be finding the audience that will appreciate it. It has a lot of heavy topics from gender affirmation, to gang violence and missing loved ones, but those are almost over shadowed at times by the bright colors, flashy scenes and the drama between the characters. It’s almost like the stories of the women in the film are connected but not enough to pull the movie together.
Emilia Pérez is opening in select theaters this Friday and will be streaming on Netflix on November 13th.
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About Emilia Pérez
From renegade auteur Jacques Audiard comes Emilia Pérez, an audacious fever dream that defies genres and expectations. Through liberating song and dance and bold visuals, this odyssey follows the journey of four remarkable 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. Written and directed by Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet), the double Cannes-winning film also stars Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and Edgar Ramírez.