Photo: Humanité.fr/ Actress Selena Gomez in the film Emilia Perez by French director Jacques Audiard.
Why not Productions/Pathé Films/France 2 Cinéma/Saint-Laurent Productions/Shanna Besson
Could it be the desire to take up the baton of the world's greatest filmmaker? Whatever the case, Jacques Audiard likes to vary the pleasures of language in his films. Sign language in Sur mes lèvres, Chinese in Les Olympiades, Corsican and Arabic in Un prophète, Tamil in Dheepan and English in Les frères sisters. Now he has ventured into Spanish with a Mexican accent in Emilia Perez, a riveting musical set against the backdrop of the drug trade. Camille and Clément Ducol's explosive blend of Don Winslow's literary trilogy (Dogclaw, Cartel and Frontiers), inspired by the lives of El Chapo, the boss of the Sinaloa cartel, and contemporary Jacques Demy. There are also comic interludes, melodrama and a thriller. That's a lot for one film. And Audiard's exploration doesn't end there. Formally, too, he takes a lot of liberties: superimpositions, fade-outs, split screens, sequences with mobile phones. And yet this excess works, moves, even amazes.
A dose of theatre, opera buffa and a gender-neutral buddy movie.
Rita (Zoé Saldana), a brilliant lawyer, is left in the shadow of a prestigious law firm. She's tired of not being used to her full potential. Not to mention all the hardships she has to swallow to save the situation of the powerful and ensure their impunity. She is offered an unlikely way out when Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascon), a powerful drug dealer, asks her to help him become what he has always wanted to be: a woman. Never mind that some of the script's ambiguities aren't very believable. Emilia Perez is a snapshot of theatre and opera buffa, as well as an unabashed buddy movie about an attempt at redemption that takes on an entire oligarchy. It's funny and moving, pulled along by Karla Sofia Gascon, a transgender actress playing a dual role that puts her face to face with her own history, and a bouncy Zoé Saldana. Enchantment.
Michael Melinard
Humanité.fr/gnews.cz-JaV_07
