In the floridly off-kilter “Emilia Pérez,” the director Jacques Audiard throws so much at you—gory crime-scene photos, a menacing cartel boss, a singing-and-dancing Zoe Saldaña—that you don’t dare blink, almost. Set largely in present-day Mexico City, the fast-track story follows a beleaguered lawyer, Rita (a very good Saldaña), who’s hired by a powerful drug lord, Manitas (a wonderful Karla Sofía Gascón), for an unusual job. Manitas, who presents as a man but identifies as a woman, wants help with clandestinely obtaining gender-affirming surgery and with tidying up some of the complications that come from a violent enterprise.
Audiard, a French filmmaker and critical favorite with a string of impressive credits, likes changing it up. He’s partial to people and stories on the margins, though he is especially drawn to crime stories; much of one of his finest films, “A Prophet,” takes place in prison. He also likes to experiment with genres and subvert their conventions, which can apply to his characters.
The complications in “Emilia Pérez” emerge in quick succession. After the brisk, eventful opener, which features a murder trial, an unjust verdict, and two musical numbers, armed strangers drive Rita to a secret location, her head shrouded. Soon, Manitas, a jefe with facial tattoos, a stringy curtain of hair, and an ominously threatening whisper, sits before her in a truck. Manitas delivers a staccato, tuneless rap that promises Rita “considerable sums of money” in exchange for her help. “I want to be a woman,” Manitas reveals sotto voce through soft lips and a mouthful of golden teeth.
Rita agrees to help, though there’s little to suggest that she could deny Manitas’s request. To that end, Rita embarks on a global search for a discreet and willing surgeon for Manitas. During one stop, she finds herself in a circular-shaped Bangkok clinic, where she, the surgical team, and gowned, bandaged patients are soon singing and striking poses. As Rita and a surgeon discuss options for Manitas, the doctor begins sing-chanting words like “mammaplasty” and “vaginoplasty” and “laryngoplasty,” which others pick up as a refrain.
Clément Ducol and Camille composed the score and songs, while Damien Jalet choreographed the song-and-dance numbers, which ranged from intimate to outsized and seamlessly integrated throughout. Most seem like manifestations of private thoughts, as in an early number in which Rita voices aloud a trial argument that she’s mentally prepping while in a grocery store. A rising rumble of voices, chanting “rising and falling,” greets her as she exits into the jeweled city night. As she walks on, her words shift into song, her movements become stylized, and the passersby turn into an ensemble.
Audiard steadily maintains the accelerated pace that he has set from the get-go, and in short order Rita is enjoying her cartel paycheck and a heavily bandaged Manitas is waking up in a clinic abroad. She takes on the name Emilia Pérez to align with her new identity. Throughout the rest of the movie, which grows exponentially busier and self-consciously melodramatic, Audiard coyly teases us with the question of whether she has truly transformed.
The movie’s racing tempo, rapidly detonating bombshells and strategic ellipses—you know more about Emilia’s love for her children than, say, how many people she murdered as a cartel boss—gives the story a destabilizing momentum and mounting suspense. That becomes even truer when, after a pause (“four years later”), the focus shifts from Rita to Emilia, who seems to have stepped out of a telenovela by way of Pedro Almodóvar and Douglas Sirk. Resettled in Mexico with seemingly infinite resources, Emilia transforms yet again, this time into a benevolent patron for victims of cartel violence, a development that introduces a jolt of horrific reality, which this movie handles like another eccentric plot turn.
That’s more than too bad, especially because Saldaña and Gascón are so appealing and sincere. Particularly, Gascón, a trans actress who not only exudes grande dame hauteur but also possesses a lucid expressivity that allows you to see the conflicting emotions pulsing under Emilia’s skin, deserves better. Audiard has created an elaborate frame for Emilia, whose desire to become her true self is moving. Hers is at once a personal truth and a new kind of heroic quest, one that the offscreen world has grotesquely politicized. Audiard has created Emilia to startle and divert, but it’s Gascón’s performance that centers and grounds the story, and it’s the actress who finally gives the movie real stakes. She embodies the essence of the film.