Emilia Perez review: Intoxicating musical is not for everyone

There are few contenders in this year’s Oscars race as divisive as Emilia Perez. It is definitely not for everyone.

The film is heightened and dramatic but that is the vibe it’s going for, not a grounded realistic piece that miscalculates and pushes into the silly. It’s supposed to be kind of melodramatic.

Emilia Perez is an operatic fairytale, a big-hearted, momentous production with grand musical numbers and unencumbered emotions. For some audiences, that’s their worst nightmare, but if you’re willing to go along for the ride, what an experience it is.

How you experience it also matters. More than gargantuan action set-pieces or a reverberating sound design in a horror film, Emilia Perez demands a cinema viewing.

Luckily for Australians, the film was picked for theatrical distribution by local outfit Kismet before its premiere at Cannes, after which Netflix bought it for the US and the UK. Pity those viewers because you don’t want to see this for the first time on anything other than a big screen in the company of others.

Like a physical cinema, Emilia Perez envelopes you and transports you into a place far removed from our own with its seductive rhythms and almost otherworldly vibe.

Most of its colourful, kinetic musical numbers are so enchanting, you almost forget yourself. Perhaps it’s that the songs are in Spanish, and you feel it more than you need to understand each word – you don’t even need to read the subtitles to get it.

Watching it on streaming at home with all those distractions would be like going on a Disneyland ride without actually doing it and just pressing play on a YouTube video of someone else’s fun day out.

The film is the story of Mexican drug lord Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascon) who hires underestimated lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana) to organise gender-affirming surgery in secret.

Afterwards, Manitas becomes Emilia Perez, faking the death of her former identity and telling no one except for Rita. Manitas’ wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and his kids don’t even know, believing him to be dead.

Years later, Emilia re-enters Rita’s life and wants her to bring her wife and kids to Mexico City, where she now lives, and tell them that Emilia is Manitas’ cousin. The family’s reintegration is a struggle, and Emilia tries to atone for her past criminal sins by becoming a patron funding the recovery of disappeared cartel victims.

The performances, particularly from Saldana, are wonderful, as each actor leans into the lofty emotional beats of their characters. The dynamic between Saldana’s Rita and Gascon’s Emilia is especially affecting, a friendship between two women who have been marginalised but have found the closest to a soulmate in each other.

Some of the criticisms against the film are reasonable. For one thing, it’s a Spanish-language film set in Mexico that was made by a French filmmaker, Jacques Audiard, and shot in France with little significant input from the Mexican creative community.

Accusations of inauthenticity are not unfounded. If you’re expecting Emilia Perez to be reflective of Mexican experiences, you will be disappointed, this is not that.

Some members of the LGBTQI community have also been critical of the film’s treatment of transgender experiences, arguing that this story comes from the perspective of cisgender filmmakers, although that denies the agency of Gascon, a transgender actor. Of course, no group, marginalised or the majority, have consensus on everything.

Like opera, Emilia Perez is going to vibe with some and not others. There is a specificity to its tone that is intoxicating, if you allow yourself to be part of its world.

Rating: 3.5/5

Emilia Perez is in cinema on January 16