EMILIA Pérez is either touched by genius or it’s the most high-falutin nonsense ever to greet our screens.
Honestly, I’m not sure which category it fits into. A little of both, perhaps. I am still trying to get my head around it!
What did I just watch?
Did I love it? Did I hate it? I really can’t decide and days after watching it, I’m still trying to come to terms with this audacious film.
New to Netflix and also showing in select cinemas, Emilia Pérez tells the story of Mexican lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldana) who is offered an unusual job to help notorious cartel boss Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) to retire and transition into living as a woman, fulfilling a long-held desire.
A French musical crime comedy film written and directed by Jacques Audiard, based on Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name, follows four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness.
Emilia Pérez comes off like an unflinching fever dream that defies genres and expectations, with a storyline that is totally preposterous, and about as realistic as Gerry Hutch troubling the next Dáil.
There’s an element of soap opera to proceedings and Audiard really plays with our emotions throughout. This is a film rife with inconsistency, purposefully so, me thinks, to toy with the audience, and leave them totally discombobulated.
Audiard’s film is equally vacuous and compassionate, idiotic and heartfelt, and keeps us guessing and reeling through moments of liberating song and dance, bold visuals, powerful performances, and even those lesser more soulless moments of pure, unadulterated daytime TV drama.
Did I love it?
Maybe.
Did I hate it?
I really couldn’t say.
It’s kind of crap, but it’s also kind of amazing.
I might have liked it more without the awful musical numbers but the opposite is also a possibility.
Emilia’s story is wildly over the top, at times heart wrenching, but somehow beautifully pulled off by a strong female cast that sees a show-stopping performance from Selena Gomez as the drug cartel’s wife Jessi.
Now go make up your own minds.
(3/5)
