Emília Pérez

Jacques Audiard has never made a careful film. A Prophet (2009), Rust and Bone (2012), Dheepan (2015) — his best work operates at a pitch of intensity that risks becoming ridiculous and usually doesn’t. Emília Pérez risks becoming ridiculous and sometimes does, and it is still one of the more interesting failures — if it is a failure — of recent Cannes competition.

The film follows Rita (Zoe Saldana), a lawyer in Mexico City hired by a cartel boss, Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón), to help him disappear and begin again as a woman named Emília. Years later, Emília has reinvented herself as an activist helping families of the disappeared find their relatives. Her past resurfaces. Sung numbers erupt at irregular intervals.

The Problem of Outsider Gaze

The film’s central controversy is well-documented: a French director making a Spanish-language film about Mexican cartel violence and trans identity, with a cast that includes non-Spanish speakers whose accents were publicly criticised in Mexico. These are legitimate objections. Audiard is working outside his culture, and the film shows it in moments where the specificity that would ground the material is replaced by operatic abstraction.

And yet. Karla Sofía Gascón’s performance in the title role is genuinely extraordinary — she plays Emília’s second life not as liberation but as a more complex re-entrapment, a person who changed everything and found that the self she was escaping had followed her. Saldana as Rita anchors the film’s moral centre with intelligence and charisma.

“The musical numbers work when Audiard lets them be strange rather than spectacular. The ones that soar are the ones that embrace the film’s absurdist logic; the ones that fail are the ones that reach for conventional emotion.”

The score by Camille and Clément Ducol is inventive and not always tasteful, which is probably the right call. Emília Pérez is a film I am still arguing with months after seeing it, which is more than I can say for most of the Cannes competition. Whether that constitutes a recommendation is something each viewer will have to decide.