A brutal Mexican cartel boss wants to leave his old life behind—and become a trans woman—in this vibrantly saucy movie musical.
Émilia Perez
Starring Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón & Selena Gomez
Directed by Jacques Audiard
R
In limited theaters Friday, Nov. 1 (streaming on Netflix Nov. 13)
A fearsome Mexican cartel leader secretly longs to become a woman. A lawyer is stuck in a dead-end job prosecuting mobsters in a system totally rigged to get them off the hook. How can they help each other out?
In this vibrantly bold tale of self-identity, change, atonement and family, Zoe Saldaña (taking a break from the sky-high sci-fi worlds of Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy) is a hardworking junior attorney who gets an offer she can’t refuse, promised unfathomable riches to help the notorious kingpin find his “real life” and leave the old one behind. Soon the legal eagle is flying all over the world to find a surgeon who’ll do the job, keep his mouth shut, and keep everything hidden from Manitas Del Monte’s wife and kids—and his old enemies.
In a bravura performance that’s already getting Oscar Best Actress buzz, real-life openly trans Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón plays the cartel boss as well as the transgendered woman, Émilia Perez, he exuberantly becomes. The lawyer spreads the coverup, that that the crime lord is dead. Of course, that’s not much of a stretch, in his line of work, and his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez, below, sizzling with secrets and hidden desires of her own, gets shuttled off for her “safety” to snowy Switzerland.
But the violence of Emilia’s former life comes home to roost when Emilia reenters the world of his wife and kids, who have no idea who she really is (and used to be), and Emilia begins to shelter Jessi and raise their children in the ruse of being their aunt.
Mexican cartels, a she who was a he, a horny kinda-ex-wife and a lawyer caught in the middle…and it’s a musical! In Spanish! Characters burst into song on the streets, in their homes, everywhere. Movie musicals, of course, are nothing new. But I’d wager a Swiss bank account full of ill-gained pesos (if I had one) that next month’s big-screen Wicked adaptation won’t have a number set in a gleaming sex-change clinic, with surgeons and patients merrily crooning about chondrolaryngoplasty—Adam’s apple reduction—and the process of turning a penis into a vagina. And you won’t hear Selena Gomez, on Only Murders in the Building, purring into a phone about an intimate part of her body that, ahem, still “aches” for a former lover. (Hint: It’s not her heart.)
It’s a boldly original, invigoratingly saucy spin on a dramatically charged story with a trio of superlative leads, intermingling elements that don’t often come together on a screen—kinda like Sicario meets Mrs. Doubtfire by way of La La Land. And as Emilia becomes an advocate for victims of cartel violence—that his male counterpart certainly helped perpetuate—the movie’s tone shifts into one of heroics and reparation, signaling another kind of “transition” entirely.
When the streets of Mexico fill with people proclaiming Emilia as a sort of national icon, you can understand why—even if you don’t break into song about Adam’s apples, penises and vaginas.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 