Women on the verge
Some great actresses give heart, depth and shading in filling out the poetic grandeur of Jacques Audiard's new musical crime thriller
The commanding and regal Karla Sofía Gascón is the self-invented and eponymous Emilia Pérez in the dramatic musical by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard. (Photos courtesy of Netflix.)
The French director Jacques Audiard is reliably unpredictable, and rarely crosses the same river twice. He’s traveled continents, and worked in different languages, genres and styles.
Some basic ideas and themes fuse together the films. Even if the results vary markedly in effectiveness, what seems undeniable is his beautiful and exciting visual style.
He is a nervy sensualist who uses the camera expressively, even voluptuously, to create heightened emotional states—the hallucinatory prison murder scene in A Prophet, or the devastating maritime work accident in Rust and Bone, with its water imagery capturing a harsh and violent foreboding.
Audiard desperately wants to breathe new life into received forms. He likes to focus on the marginalized and the dispossessed. He also grooves on the idiosyncratic and violent impulses of the New American Cinema of the seventies, especially the films of Martin Scorsese. One of his earlier films, The Beat that My Heart Skipped imaginatively reworked, in a French context, James Toback’s feverish and propulsive Fingers.
(For more about the director and his previous work, check out the special programming at the Criterion Channel, which is showing three of his past works. A subscription is required.)
For all of his talent, for better or worse, Audiard is deeply beholden to his material. There’s a shared intensity and intimacy about his work, suggesting a true believer. His new film, Emilia Pérez, is now available on Netflix after torching Cannes, and playing the fall festival film art cycle.
The best moments are sharp, exciting and engaging. The big swings by the filmmaker mostly connect. The dramatic and interpolated songs, with their absurdity and grandeur, could unmake a lesser work. They’re central to the formal and narrative construction, and yield a heightened sensuousness and stylization.
It plays like a pastiche of Dennis Potter, Brecht, Fassbinder, Sirk and Almodovar. The movie’s uneven, with comparable highs and lows, and the ending (if you’ve seen Dheepan) is pretty predictable and deeply unsatisfying.
The musical numbers are more dialectical than narrative points of entry. They effectively express joy, melancholy, pain or anger. They capture something direct, personal, or plaintive. Say this about Audiard.
He is not a recessive or conventional filmmaker, and he is never afraid to fail or be perceived as ridiculous—sometimes in the same frame.
As a director Audiard is at his best drawing out his characters’ tragic vulnerability and need for escape and wonder. In his films, violence is not just the inevitable consequence. It defines the natural order. Since his breakthrough second feature A Self-Made Hero, Audiard has been drawn to stories challenging myth.
Like much of the director’s work, the new movie fixates on identity and authenticity. Apart from some early globetrotting scenes, Emilia Pérez is very centered and tight. It’s a largely Spanish-language movie set around Mexico City and deals with power, sexuality and status.
Private space becomes a public spectacle, in the outsized dreams and open imagination of the hero, Rita Castro (Zoe Saldaña). She’s a skilled and highly capable lawyer who’s privately outraged at how the wealthy and privileged corrupt the system.
Her early work getting a wealthy man acquitted in the murder of his wife sets up another moral quandary when a powerful cartel boss tells her plainly and unambiguously in a frightening and eerie rendezvous: “I want to be a woman.”
The drug lord, named Manitas (wonderfully played by Karla Sofía Gascón with a soulful gravity and aching vulnerability), is a cut throat operator who’s bludgeoned the competition, and condoned or participated in outrageous acts of violence.
Now they clandestinely seek sex-affirmation surgery, and enlists Rita to carry out the practical complications. Her reward is a massive payout. Given the cloak and dagger nature of their initial encounter, turning the drug lord down is not a realistic option.
Audiard uses the musically beautifully to create mood, atmosphere and an emotional range that feels fluid, free and highly permissive. Clément Ducol and Camille created the score and songs, and Damien Jalet is the choreographer.
They're very good at shaping the music to mood and atmosphere, and altering the size and scope accordingly, like the opening with Saldaña that begins inside a grocery store and then moves into the open streets.
Lithe, cool and impossibly beautiful, Saldaña has an athlete’s angularity and grace, and she moves with precision and power. Even when the mass of bodies form around her, her singularity stands out.
Against the popular revolt, Audiard never forgets his real theme is power and authority, so Saldaña is alternatively shown writing the legal brief that will earn her privileged client an undeserved fate.
Moments later, the dialectical materialist underpinnings are made even more explicit, with Saldaña joined by domestic workers in a furious and beautiful lament about the corruption of power and her own deeply felt connection with the powerless (especially the racism brought about by her Blackness).
My favorite number, the most intimate and emotionally devastating, plays out in the tight confines of a car with the drug lord, two years into hormone therapy, confessing to Saldaña about dreams and desires, body autonomy, and freedom.
I wish Audiard had focused more intensely on private anguish and inner tumult. (His tendency toward the dramatic and the showdown is his worst instinct.)
Structurally the movie has a forty-minute prologue, and a two-part clearing of the decks as the personal, sexual and emotional repercussions are carried to their logical extreme. Audiard has a fast though unhurried tempo, and the story races ahead without much interruption.
Very quickly, the drug lord stages his death and goes to a clinic to be “reborn,” as Emilia Pérez, with the galvanizing and deeply entrancing Karla Sofía Gascón taking the baton from Saldaña as the film’s emotional centerpiece.
Tall, imperial, tough, Gascón is a regal and natural presence. The balance of the story is perhaps best expressed as a biological tension of her divided self, between her violent, hierarchical and patriarchal past and more hopeful and egalitarian future.
At her core, the wholly invented character of Emilia Pérez orbits three very particular women: Saldana, her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and new love interest, Epifanía (Adriana Paz). Audiard is after something more complex and slippery, and the increasing plot complications flatten the movie’s wider power and effectiveness.
Audiard either ignores or refuses to acknowledge the pain, violence and death Emilia brought upon others. Is the ending the deliverance or too easy moral reckoning? If you like the movie (and I mostly do), it’s easy to call it audacious or original, and leave it at that.
Do all the parts cohere? Of course not. I’ll take something that occasionally flails or misses its mark than to enjoy the private moments of rapture and power.
The four actresses were given the acting prize at Cannes. Women have been either absent or victimized in Audiard’s previous films (like Emamnuel Devos’s otherwise excellent work in Read My Lips). Gomez is a bit of a revelation, showing off a mixture of toughness, panache and determination.
Jacques Audiard is not likely to ever make a towering masterpiece. With Emilia Pérez as the nearest example, he is incapable of making a disappointing movie.
The French director Jacques Audard is reliably unpredictable, and rarely crosses the same river twice. He’s traveled continents, and worked in different languages, genres and styles.
Some basic ideas and themes fuse together the films. Even if the results vary markedly in effectiveness, what seems undeniable is his beautiful and exciting visual style.
He is a nervy sensualist who uses the camera expressively, even voluptuously, to create heightened emotional states—the hallucinatory prison murder scene in A Prophet, or the devastating maritime work accident in Rust and Bone, with its water imagery capturing a harsh and violent foreboding.
Audiard desperately wants to breathe new life into received forms. He likes to focus on the marginalized and the dispossessed. He also grooves on the idiosyncratic and violent impulses of the New American Cinema of the seventies, especially the films of Martin Scorsese. One of his earlier films, The Beat that My Heart Skipped imaginatively reworked, in a French context, James Toback’s feverish and propulsive Fingers.
(For more about the director and his previous work, check out the special programming at the Criterion Channel, which is showing three of his past works. A subscription is required.)
For all of his talent, for better or worse, Audiard is deeply beholden to his material. There’s a shared intensity and intimacy about his work, suggesting a true believer. His new film, Emilia Pérez, is now available on Netflix after torching Cannes, and playing the fall festival film art cycle.
The best moments are sharp, exciting and engaging. The big swings by the filmmaker mostly connect. The dramatic and interpolated songs, with their absurdity and grandeur, could unmake a lesser work. They’re central to the formal and narrative construction, and yield a heightened sensuousness and stylization.
It plays like a pastiche of Dennis Potter, Brecht, Fassbinder, Sirk and Almodovar. The movie’s uneven, with comparable highs and lows, and the ending (if you’ve seen Dheepan) is pretty predictable and deeply unsatisfying.
The musical numbers are more dialectical than narrative points of entry. They effectively express joy, melancholy, pain or anger. They capture something direct, personal, or plaintive. Say this about Audiard.
He is not a recessive or conventional filmmaker, and he is never afraid to fail or be perceived as ridiculous—sometimes in the same frame.
As a director Audiard is at his best drawing out his characters’ tragic vulnerability and need for escape and wonder. In his films, violence is not just the inevitable consequence. It defines the natural order. Since his breakthrough second feature A Self-Made Hero, Audiard has been drawn to stories challenging myth.
Like much of the director’s work, the new movie fixates on identity and authenticity. Apart from some early globetrotting scenes, Emilia Pérez is very centered and tight. It’s a largely Spanish-language movie set around Mexico City and deals with power, sexuality and status.
Private space becomes a public spectacle, in the outsized dreams and open imagination of the hero, Rita Castro (Zoe Saldaña). She’s a skilled and highly capable lawyer who’s privately outraged at how the wealthy and privileged corrupt the system.
Her early work getting a wealthy man acquitted in the murder of his wife sets up another moral quandary when a powerful cartel boss tells her plainly and unambiguously in a frightening and eerie rendezvous: “I want to be a woman.”
The drug lord, named Manitas (wonderfully played by Karla Sofía Gascón with a soulful gravity and aching vulnerability), is a cut throat operator who’s bludgeoned the competition, and condoned or participated in outrageous acts of violence.
Now they clandestinely seek sex-affirmation surgery, and enlists Rita to carry out the practical complications. Her reward is a massive payout. Given the cloak and dagger nature of their initial encounter, turning the drug lord down is not a realistic option.
Audiard uses the musically beautifully to create mood, atmosphere and an emotional range that feels fluid, free and highly permissive. Clément Ducol and Camille created the score and songs, and Damien Jalet is the choreographer.
They're very good at shaping the music to mood and atmosphere, and altering the size and scope accordingly, like the opening with Saldaña that begins inside a grocery store and then moves into the open streets.
Lithe, cool and impossibly beautiful, Saldaña has an athlete’s angularity and grace, and she moves with precision and power. Even when the mass of bodies form around her, her singularity stands out.
Against the popular revolt, Audiard never forgets his real theme is power and authority, so Saldaña is alternatively shown writing the legal brief that will earn her privileged client an undeserved fate.
Moments later, the dialectical materialist underpinnings are made even more explicit, with Saldaña joined by domestic workers in a furious and beautiful lament about the corruption of power and her own deeply felt connection with the powerless (especially the racism brought about by her Blackness).
My favorite number, the most intimate and emotionally devastating, plays out in the tight confines of a car with the drug lord, two years into hormone therapy, confessing to Saldaña about dreams and desires, body autonomy, and freedom.
I wish Audiard had focused more intensely on private anguish and inner tumult. (His tendency toward the dramatic and the showdown is his worst instinct.)
Structurally the movie has a forty-minute prologue, and a two-part clearing of the decks as the personal, sexual and emotional repercussions are carried to their logical extreme. Audiard has a fast though unhurried tempo, and the story races ahead without much interruption.
Very quickly, the drug lord stages his death and goes to a clinic to be “reborn,” as Emilia Pérez, with the galvanizing and deeply entrancing Karla Sofía Gascón taking the baton from Saldaña as the film’s emotional centerpiece.
Tall, imperial, tough, Gascón is a regal and natural presence. The balance of the story is perhaps best expressed as a biological tension of her divided self, between her violent, hierarchical and patriarchal past and more hopeful and egalitarian future.
At her core, the wholly invented character of Emilia Pérez orbits three very particular women: Saldana, her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and new love interest, Epifanía (Adriana Paz). Audiard is after something more complex and slippery, and the increasing plot complications flatten the movie’s wider power and effectiveness.
Audiard either ignores or refuses to acknowledge the pain, violence and death Emilia brought upon others. Is the ending the deliverance or too easy moral reckoning? If you like the movie (and I mostly do), it’s easy to call it audacious or original, and leave it at that.
Do all the parts cohere? Of course not. I’ll take something that occasionally flails or misses its mark than to enjoy the private moments of rapture and power.
The four actresses were given the acting prize at Cannes. Women have been either absent or victimized in Audiard’s previous films (like Emamnuel Devos’s otherwise excellent work in Read My Lips). Gomez is a bit of a revelation, showing off a mixture of toughness, panache and determination.
Jacques Audiard is not likely to ever make a towering masterpiece. With Emilia Pérez as the nearest example, he is incapable of making a disappointing movie.
