Review: In ‘Emilia Pérez,’ a musical heightened by danger, passion pours out like a confession

A lawyer, a kingpin, and his wife walk into a musical, and “Emilia Pérez” is born, Frenchman Jacques Audiard’s full-bodied, colorful epic about transformation, redemption and finding one’s voice in a hard world. But also, because this is still an Audiard film, it’s about what we can never escape.

Never one to ignore how rich the crime genre can be in girding his tales of pain and release (“A Prophet,” “Dheepan”), the writer-director has taken his biggest swing yet with “Emilia Pérez,” using its Mexican milieu of cartels and suffering as the basis for a full-throated Spanish-language sing-a-thon built around a gender re-assignment — one that effectively, if unwittingly, triggers a nation’s ache for change. That’s a full plate for any filmmaker, even someone as experienced with interior turbulence as Audiard.

But he’s also made one of his most satisfying movie movies to date by centering the experiences of three (and eventually four) fierce women, rather than his usual brooding men. Audiard pushes them all into a type of feverish, Almodovar-adjacent melodrama that suits his instinct for sensorial cinema. It’s not surprising he understands the crazy tone-and-texture logic of a musical number, aided by editor Juliette Welfling’s rhythmic (but never overdone) cutting.

First up in the scenario is Zoe Saldaña’s Rita, an overworked lawyer tired of wasting her talents on defending violent men, yet drawn to the proposition offered in private one night by fearsome cartel lord Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón): Help facilitate a secret transition surgery and the world will have one less bad guy and one more fulfilled woman. Two, ostensibly, if you count the payday that will allow Rita to move on from her job. Then again, subtract one, if you consider Manitas’ unsuspecting, much younger wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), who is whisked away to Switzerland with their two children under the ruse of imminent danger, then made to believe her husband has been murdered.

It’s all pulp-operatic enough already, with declarative, percussive tunes from Clément Ducol and Camille adding pop to the feelings (rage, concern, longing) of any given scene. But it’s when the story jumps ahead four years, and wealthy, glamorous Emilia Pérez (Gascón) stages a run-in with a stunned Rita, that the movie’s second-act narrative sows a richer tapestry of showstoppers and laments. Emilia, drawn emotionally to reconnect and revise her old life, manipulates everyone’s destinies back to Mexico City: Restless, lonely Jessi moves in with generous, unheard-of “cousin” Emilia, the kids get a doting new (but somehow familiar) aunt, while Emilia and Rita — now friends and allies — start an NGO to help anguished women locate missing husbands and sons. Love even blooms for Emilia with a distraught widow (a wonderful Adriana Paz).

Invariably, there are off-melody complications in everyone’s quest for joy. In “Emilia Pérez,” as in many Audiard films, a new life, no matter how emboldening, is merely a holding pattern until the past comes roaring back. No wonder, then, that a filmmaker as attuned to tenderness and violence as Audiard has found the stuff of his metaphor-laden genre dreams in the story of a trans queenpin emerging from a toxic male shell. It all percolates in the shadowy urban allure of Paul Guilhaume’s cinematography, especially as it plays across its leading ladies’ faces, turning skin into a mood palette, burnishing all the musical interludes.

Zoe Saldaña in the movie “Emilia Pérez.”

(Netflix)

None of it would work, however, without the command of this justifiably Cannes-honored cast. Gomez’s spikiness feels like an asset the movies should be fostering and Gascón’s sensually charged portrayal wouldn’t be out of place anchoring a classic Hollywood woman’s noir. But the real knockout is Saldaña, a compassionate audience surrogate and urgent energy source. Musicals — good ones, imaginative ones, like “Emilia Pérez” — have a way of rocketing underappreciated talents into the stratosphere and, in a sequence like the hard-edged, dazzlingly choreographed “El Mal” number, in which she slices a scorn-filled path across a gala benefit of rich hypocrites, it’s easy to believe Saldaña could be the most versatile screen actor around.