It may be France’s submission to the Academy Awards, but the toothless musical thriller ‘Emilia Pérez’ is criminally inane

Jacques Audiard has an appetite for adulation: he’s a regular at the Cannes Film Festival, whose competition serves as literal and figurative home turf for a filmmaker whose esthetic is as plush and photogenic as a red carpet.
At 72, the Paris-born Audiard (“Rust and Bone,” “The Sisters Brothers”) has become a decorated purveyor of accessible art-house cinema. His form of strenuously virtuoso showmanship does not reflect contemporary festival-circuit trends so much as it sets the bar. There’s no denying that Audiard is a brand-name filmmaker: the question is whether his muscle-flexing, button-pushing approach has migrated past mastery and into self-parody.
Based on the evidence of “Emilia Pérez,” the answer is a resounding yes. This is a toothless movie that nevertheless bites off more than it can chew. Like many of Audiard’s films, it fuses prestige with pulp — very successfully in the eyes of this year’s Cannes jury, which bestowed on it two major prizes. (The film was also selected by France as its Oscar submission.)
The film concerns a ruthless cartel kingpin who yearns to begin a new life as a woman, only to suffer pangs of regret over abandoning her wife and children in the process. The scenario is stridently lurid and absurd, in keeping with Audiard’s tendency to tell stories and foreground characters located far outside his own experience.
Stylistically, “Emilia Pérez” has been conceived as a mash-up of seemingly incompatible genres, with florid soap-opera plotting, gritty thrillerisms and stylized musical sequences. It’s also very much an exercise in artificiality, starting with the fact that Audiard has mostly recreated Mexico City on a Parisian sound stage — a tactic that could theoretically connect to the material’s themes of identity and deception, but seems more like a practical consideration. Besides, it’s hard to practice sleight-of-hand when you’re all thumbs, and Audiard’s embrace of artificiality proves counterintuitive here. Instead of using fakery to plumb depths of social or emotional reality, the slick, textureless images and contrived plot line serve only to expose their own phoniness.
The same goes for the songs, which suggest a filmmaker hedging his bets. In lieu of a full-throated modern opera, we get limp, Lin-Manuel-Miranda-lite numbers that rarely tell us anything we don’t know about characters whose interiority is subordinate to their use as cogs to grind the wheels of a convoluted yet utterly mechanical narrative.
Rita (a very good Zoe Saldana) is a gifted but cynical attorney entering her 40s in a fog of low-key self-loathing: she knows that her gig defending high-rolling, misogynist scumbags is eating away at her soul little by little, and suspects that it’d be easier — and more profitable — to simply let herself be swallowed up into the belly of the beast.
Enter the menacing but weirdly ingratiating drug lord known as Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón), a cold-blooded killer whose notoriety belies a plangent sensitivity. After effectively abducting Rita from her day job and presenting her with a proverbial offer she can’t refuse (both for reasons of price tag and personal safety), Manitas shares a desire to inhabit a better, more authentic self — one without blood on her hands.
Rita’s job is to find a surgeon willing to operate on a patient with plenty of money but no I.D. Instead of actually dramatizing (or even depicting) the process of gender transition, however, Audiard settles for a Busby Berkeley pastiche featuring goofy rhymes about vaginoplasty and set at a Thai gender-reassignment clinic — an example of laziness masquerading as edginess.
We’re then hurtled four years into the future, where Rita is reunited with the erstwhile Manitas in the latter’s new incarnation as Emilia Pérez — a big-hearted, deep-pocketed matriarch with designs on keeping her children and ex-wife close without disclosing her true identity.
There are a lot of ways to play this material, and “Emilia Pérez” feints in a bunch of different directions at once, including a few detours into pure sanctimony, such as the mawkish group singalong by family members of people killed during the cartel wars. It’s a fine line between well-intentioned empathy and shameless exploitation, and Audiard never manages to find the right side of it.
He’s also unable — or maybe just unwilling — to truly interrogate the ethical paradox at the heart of the story: the balance between humanism and hypocrisy in Emilia’s reinvention as a self-styled social justice warrior. Even when the film moves toward ambivalence, it backs off in favour of sentimentality.
It’s frustrating to watch a movie that doesn’t trust us to think (or feel) for ourselves and so keeps jolting us with clichés until we’re numb. The only feeling that emerges in the coda is relief that “Emilia Pérez” is over.