France’s commercial issue-hustler Jacques Audiard strikes again.
The funeral procession that climaxes Emilia Pérez is the damnedest, craziest thing since Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic minions draped kente cloth stoles over their shoulders and kneeled to canonize George Floyd at the Capitol. In Emilia Pérez, a caravan of women crowd a street in Mexico City, marching and singing to commemorate the deaths of transsexual drug-dealer-turned-activist Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) and his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez), both killed — good riddance! — in a botched drug-cartel kidnapping.
It’s a political stunt as well as the final musical number in a film that fosters the religion of politics. The title Emilia Pérez is meant to be a catchphrase — a shibboleth — honoring the trans movement as a fulfillment of the feminist movement. Our worshipful, far-left media want to pretend that this film is the dazzling, hipster delight that Spielberg’s West Side Story, Oprah’s The Color Purple, and John Chu’s Wicked all failed to be.
French director-writer Jacques Audiard, a longtime leftist advocate whose past films A Prophet, Rust and Bone, The Beat That My Heart Skipped always advanced pandering social positions, now assumes moral validation. His agenda here is embodied by three characters: Emilia; Jessi; and the lead pivotal character Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a struggling lawyer who advances from defending a man who murdered his wife to becoming the lawyer for cartel kingpin Manitas del Monte (also played by Gascón), then abetting his sexual transition.
Rita sees herself as a public defender. The wealth and power that come with public recognition twist her already compromised professionalism so that she accepts her own quasi-lesbian sense of sexual inadequacy. She begins the movie-musical conceit singing about her social isolation (songs by Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais).
Audiard extols Rita, Emilia, and Jessi on their individual clichéd “journey” toward sisterhood. (Adriana Paz as Emilia’s lover Epifania becomes the fourth leg in Audiard’s solidarity platform.)
Prior to witness-protection surgery, Manitas was a figure of toxic masculinity, responsible for numerous drug-trade killings. (One of the Ducol-Calmais songs equates cartel viciousness with Argentina’s infamous “Dirty War” from 1976 to 1983, when 10,000 citizens were “disappeared.”) Sanctimonious Audiard always mixes transgression with “noble” causes, but here, working in the movie-musical genre, he commercializes his bonkers politics.
It is typical left-wing arrogance to presume that our world, already suffering from the criminal abuse of border invasion, child-trafficking, and drug deaths, will embrace those crises in the form of glorified fantasy.
The Saldaña, Gomez, and Gascón ensemble (jointly awarded the Best Actress prize at Cannes) limns distinct stages of drag queen effrontery, lust, and aggression, all converging to affirm gender “reassignment.” It’s a cuckoo riff on Walter Hill’s The Assignment, from 2016, where mad scientist Sigourney Weaver took revenge on a hitman (played by Michelle Rodriquez) by performing a sex change. Audiard ignores Hill’s complexity about sexual and spiritual identity in favor of sentimental progressive permissiveness.
Audiard has referred to his script as a libretto, but Emilia Pérez stretches past operatic goofiness. Each aria-song, through middling Latin pop and rap hybrids, expresses the egomania of sociopaths. (Imagine Nancy Pelosi’s traffic-cop gesticulations waving a musical baton.)
The religiosity of Emilia Pérez is evident in its absolute adherence to trans issues. This shamelessly asserts showbiz cultural-religious biases against traditional values. Audiard flatters how most Hollywood-Broadway camp-followers think. Rita’s first song, pleading “Open the courtroom of your conscience,” mixes politics with social moralizing.
This way leads to tyranny, which may explain why Rita, Jessi, and Emilia never think about the consequences of drug cartels and sicarios. Irony No. 1: Dark-skinned Rita suffers most in service to gente blanca. Irony No. 2: Saldana’s smile once was disarming in Spielberg’s The Terminal, yet she acted emotional conflict more effectively as a hitwoman in Olivier Megaton’s Colombiana. (Since then, Saldana has played freaks in Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Star Trek reboot, and almost lost her career in a misbegotten Nina Simone biopic. This is her chance to receive the industry’s ultimate accolade.)
Despite its flashy genre mash-up, Emilia Pérez is stuck with a coarse, unappealing protagonist. Gascón’s biologically male Emilia remains a toxic nonbinary whatzit even after surgery — ruthlessly forcing everyone into criminality, deception, and ethical compromises. (Emilia Pérez holds the distinction of being the only movie musical with a montage about NGOs — justifying one of the key causes of border-invasion chaos.)
Throughout this multilingual, French-produced eccentricity, Audiard splashes place-names of its changing international settings (from North America to Israel to Asia) like a James Bond travelogue — espionage celebrating gender dysphoria and greed. It follows the route of globalist disorder and ends up evoking Nancy Pelosi’s treachery — that funereal-protest set piece of self-righteous, culture-destroying immorality.