It’s hard to make a musical with any kind of meaning these days. It either dies under the weight of its own conceit or becomes much too lightweight. Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez manages to find the sweet spot between intention and execution and comes up with a wholly absorbing film which never loses sight of its story in the song-and-the-dance.
And those there are a-plenty in the film, about a fearsome mobster coasting on his ill-gotten millions from his drug business wanting to undergo a radical transformation: he may have enough cash to buy everything but his deepest desire is to become who he has always wanted to be, a woman. And what he wants, he gets, but he can’t do it on his own.
As Rita Castro, the lowly-paid lawyer who becomes the mob boss’s ‘associate’, Zoe Saldana is outstanding. He gives her an offer she can’t refuse, in true Godfather style, and from then on she is committed to do whatever it takes to turn Juan Del Monte into Emilia Perez. Money, a lot of it, is a powerful lubricant.
But neither the newly-minted Emilia, played beautifully by the real-life transgender person Karla Sofia Gascon, nor Rita can reckon what love can do: no one bothered to give Del Monte’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) the memo, so she is the only one not in the know. When she confronts the woman who used to be her husband, after months of being in the dark, her reaction is of deep dismay. Deception, once the cover blows off it, is a dark alley.
Mixing crime and music can be tricky. But Audiard, no stranger to the Cannes competition (A Prophet, Dheepan), does enough with the combination to elevate it from a standard crime drama. The songs and dances are there for just enough time and never allowed to overpower the narrative, though I kept waiting for Gomez to break out; here she plays an unhappy abandoned wife but stays subdued, perhaps because the other two have the more outlined roles. But then she does get to make up for it with gun-toting scenes featuring a few sawn-off fingers and lots of blood: what’s a mob without rattling guns and shootouts, after all?
Or maybe we’ve all been getting a lot of Gomez, who is a social media superstar and the owner of a popular make-up brand, and we identify with that version of her so much that it superimposes itself on any or all parts that she may get in the movies. Her little-girl-lost-real-crime-podcaster in Only Murders In The Building could also have something to do with it, of course: every time she turns up in her furs, asking plaintively about her missing husband, you flash back to the series, whose fourth season is around the corner.
Mainstream Indian films, with their thick spread of song and dance, can be also termed musicals, but a film like this reminds you of the rare ‘desi’ outing which uses music to further and embellish the narrative. One such is Amol Palekar’s 1990 Thoda Sa Roomani Ho Jaayen, a lovely rom-com starring Nana Patekar, Anita Kanwar and Vikram Gokhale, which never gets old.
Meanwhile, Emilia Perez is a spirited chancy-dancy thing, a good pick-me-up in the middle of the festival.
A very different film, also about sexual identity, the importance of finding your identity and the fault lines it can create amongst communities and families, is Three Kilometers To The End Of The World. Romanian director Emanuel Parvu, who has worked as an actor in Cristian Mungiu’s films, isn’t interested in making his lead character, the 17-year-old Adi’s queer orientation, as a peg for statements about ‘coming out’ and so on.
Parvu is more interested in a slow but steady excavation of the prejudices that cripple even the most well-meaning people who surround Adi, who has been severely beaten when we come upon him at the beginning of the film. It is a clear case of homophobia, and the culprits who administer the beating are identified quite soon.
But the heavier pain is inflicted by the lack of empathy in Adi’s parents: it’s not like they don’t want to understand, it’s more that they have no tools to do so. Often, the deliberate pace draws things to a near stand-still, but it also allows the film to come as close to life as cinema can.