Emilia Perez, trans identity between musicals, melody and noir, Jacques Audiard’s new film exudes Cinema

Not a single film but 100, all together, magnificently mixed, concentrated, ranging from noir, melody, musical comedy, soap opera of times gone by. After having enchanted Cannes 2024, winning both the Jury Prize and a Prix d’interprétation féminine for its three fantastic actresses, Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard landed on the Rome Film Festival, strongly reiterating what was written on the Croisette 6 months ago . We are in the presence of an overwhelming, unclassifiable work, which is never as it seems, perpetually capable of changing, astounding, fascinating, proudly embracing its thousand identities.

Emilia Perez, the plot

Emilia Perez it is a film that takes advantage of decades of cinema, an experience to live in the theater, allowing yourself to be overwhelmed by its expressive force. The protagonist is a brilliant lawyer definitely accustomed to dealing with criminals who receives an unexpected offer: to help an important Mexican cartel boss disappear from circulation forever, a dangerous man who has killed hundreds if not thousands of people, very rich, with a wife and two children. But how to succeed? Realizing the dream of a lifetime, becoming a woman. Assignment accepted and destined to change the lives of many…

Emilia Perez, aesthetic triumph

Prize for best screenplay at Cannes A very discreet heroGrand prix con The prophetPalme d’Or with Dheepan and Silver Lion in Venice with The Brothers SistersJacques Audiard has drawn from the thousand genres he has embraced throughout his career to give life to the most surprising musical of recent decades. As if Damien Chazelle met Pedro Almodovar and Luc Besson, forcefully riding an inhuman quantity of ideas, styles, visions, intuitions, between torments and passions.

L’Emilia Perez of the title is a transgender woman who has always harbored the desire to be her, despite being born in a male body, raised in a hovel, becoming a death machine, with years spent thinking about suicide and the desire to finally wake up in the right body , adapted to one’s real self, trying to redeem a first existence marked by crime, by murders, by the harm caused to thousands of people. Once her identity has been affirmed, Emilia is reborn to a new life, finds a smile for the first time, embraces love again, reinvents herself as a champion of the weakest, friend of the families of the victims who mysteriously disappeared in the very dangerous Mexico, where over 100,000 people are not never been found again. Killed, torn to pieces, burned, buried who knows where.

Three actresses in a state of grace

Audiard tells all this by making his magnificent protagonists sing and dance, with dazzling colorful choreographies that burst onto the screen when you least expect it, suddenly changing gear in a generally dark and pessimistic film which in the meantime sows genres without interruption, managing miraculously to amalgamate them, to make everything sensationally credible, centered, balanced, functional to a story of discovery, redemption and redemption, of feelings and souls that certainly cannot change through a surgical operation.

Behind the original (and musically speaking not memorable) songs signed by the singer-songwriter Camille (in one the vaginoplasty is sung) and the energetic choreographies of Damien Jalet, Emilia Perez shines even if not above all thanks to three actresses in a state of grace. Zoe Saldanaqueen of the box office thanks to blockbusters like Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Trek, has never been so good, a 40-year-old single with a brilliant career, a millionaire and yet unhappy, unfulfilled, with sudden choreographies that see her twirling between set tables. Selena Gomez12 years ago surprising in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and now queen of Only Murders in the Building, is the woman of a boss with a heart divided in half, between the man she thinks is dead, a mysterious aunt obsessed with her two children and a passionate lover who made her rediscover the will to live.

Emilia Pérez è Karla Sofia Gascón

And then there’s her, the exceptional Karla Sofía Gascón who aims to become the first transgender woman nominated for an Oscar in Academy history. In the first act of the film we see Karla Sofía in the clothes of the boss Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, with a deep voice, long beard, tattoos, long and dirty hair, gold-plated teeth and terrifying physicality. 4 years later she resurrects as the protagonist of the title, an elegant woman with multiple internal torments who inevitably cannot completely erase her past life, despite wanting to start another.

There are so many themes in Emilia Perez, between social and political criticism, self-search, family ties and troubled loves, which Jacques Audiard decided to give shape with an absolutely conscious illogicality, through sincere vibrations, tangible feelings, telling multiple stories in one. Bold like few other titles, Emilia Perez stylistically speaking, it is dazzling, commendable, the crazy meeting point between the thousand ideas of an author who has never been so ambitious and stimulated, courageous and visionary. The search for an identity, one’s own in the world, involves all three protagonists, cisgender and transgender women, between genetic and acquired motherhood, while Jacques Audiard he dances, talks, sings, gashes and amazes like never before. Awaiting him next March 3rd will be an almost certain and more than dutiful Oscar award for best foreign film, a statuette that France hasn’t won since 1993, with Indochina.

If not now, with his unforgettable Emilia Perez, when?