CANNES 2024: Music and bodies. Emilia Perez

Emilia Perez by Palme d'Or winner Jacques Audiard is a stunning, provocative film - musical crime tragicomedy.

     Mexico City. Talented lawyer Rita  is kidnapped by cartel boss Manitas, who has an odd request for her. The drug king, who’s already been taking hormone treatments for two years, wants to have gender confirmation surgery. Rita should find a surgeon and after false news of Manitas’ death emerge, she has to move his wife and children to Switzerland. She is offered an unbelievably huge sum of money for this service.

     There are musical numbers featuring patients in wheelchairs and bandages and doctors singing and dancing: “Nanoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Laryngoplasty! Chondrolaryngoplasty!”. Rita responds with her own lyrics: “Changing the body changes the soul/Changing the soul changes society/Changing society changes everything!”.

     Four years later,  Rita meets Manitas in a London restaurant – bit now that’s a charming  woman Emilia Perez. Rita's new assignment is to pick up the family from their comfortable refuge in Switzerland and return them to Mexico City. A lot of adventures follow. Meanwhile Emilia Perez wants to atone for her countless sins, so she opens a non-governmental organization to search for the bodies of missing people (kidnapped by her/his cartel).

    All that sounds like a soap opera – or maybe Almodóvar's film? But compared to Almodovar’s oeuvre, it’s too decorative and too musically chaotic. The choreography and songs actually cover up the problems with dramaturgy. But Paul Guillaume's movie camera is "drawn" into the universal dance composed by the Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet.

The story is inspired by the novel by French writer Boris Razon Écoute.