Gangsters Don’t Sing: Emilia Perez

The film’s sold as a musical crime drama. It fails as both a musical and a crime drama and its attempts to be both cancel each other out.

Grade: F- (yes, that is the lowest grade I can possibly give)

It’s garbage so perfect you’ll wonder you can’t smell it.

You will be counting the plot’s holes, fissures and cavities on both your hands. Karla Sofia Gascon plays Mexican kingpin Juan “Manitas” Del Monte and hires lawyer Rita Mora Castro, played by Zoe Saldana, to help him become a woman. A degree hangs on Rita’s wall but it’s not for medicine, yet Juan is hiring her to help him with gender-transition surgery. He also won’t tell her that’s the job until she signs the contract. (Apparently gangsters use written legal documents for all their deals. You may wonder if Juan gets all his lackies pushing his drugs to sign employment contracts, and his bodyguards and his hit men). “Knowing is accepting,” Juan tells Rita and that’s supposed to be his explanation. Yet Rita signs the contract.

Wind back: Juan’s got his henchmen to kidnap Rita off the street at night, throw a bag over her head, and drive her to the middle of the desert to meet him, and Rita knows Juan is a big-time gangster and she’s a criminal defence lawyer in one of the most crime-ridden nations on Earth and she just got her latest client acquitted for murdering his wife by arguing the woman killed herself. Rita could be agreeing to anything from forging a signature to helping to launder the proceeds of a child sex trafficking ring and she’d know this. And she still signs the contract. Saldana doesn’t act dumb enough for you to believe her character would actually do something this stupid, just like how Juan’s obvious competence at criminal enterprise stops him from convincing you that he’d genuinely hire Rita like this or even hire her at all. Neither they nor the plot will seem real to you. They’ll look confected. It’ll all look phony.

The characters in Emilia Perez are empty husks. “I want to be a woman,” Juan tells Rita. That’s the widest window you get into his soul. Watch him as he becomes a woman and then uses his criminal connections to start finding the missing remains of victims of crime and you will watch one of the longest displays of the defining trait of poor writing: the character acting not because it’s what they would do but it’s what the filmmaker wants them to do.

Jacques Audiard wrote and directed the film and he failed to furnish Juan with the principles and inclinations to make any of his actions believable. Nor did he appropriately supply Saldana’s character with anything other than a tissue of whiny complaints about her lot. His stinginess, that’s just incompetent characterisation, doesn’t stop there. Selena Gomez plays Juan’s wife, yet the defining line for this beloved wife of a murderous drug lord is when she tells her lover “My pussy still hurts when I think of you.” These aren’t people. They’re mannequins.

The film’s sold as a musical crime drama. It fails as both a musical and a crime drama and its attempts to be both cancel each other out.

Audiard didn’t shoot the film in Mexico or research the country and its extensive criminal landscape. He said that he already knew what he wanted. Whatever he already knew wasn’t enough. He makes Mexico’s criminal underworld look like a magical land of Oz where monkeys can fly and lions can talk without explanation and Juan is the magical Wizard of Oz who can make anything happen with a wave of his hand. His family is sent to a Swiss chalet, Rita is paid enough money into hidden bank accounts so she never has to work again and his former criminal associates spill their guts on their crimes and reveal where the bodies are buried all without so much as a peep under the hood of how this all actually gets done.

Audiard refuses to touch his subject-matter. Christopher Nolan has constructed all the worlds of his films for real, even when it involved building whole cities, spaceships, crashing a real plane and recreating the first A-bomb detonation, and Michael Mann’s interviewed real cops and professional thieves for his crime dramas. Compared to them, Audiard looks like an arrogant and lazy teenager who thinks he can write his modern history essay the night before it’s due off the cuff and predictably hands up a piece of rubbish.

Audiard fails as abysmally at making a musical as he does at making a crime film. The lyrics vary between asinine and bizarre. Juan’s son sings about how his dad smells like everything from avocado to the mountains. When he’s done singing, you’ll wonder if there’s anything his father doesn’t smell like. Characters sing about how they’re “free as air” and want to “make love with love.” When they dance, they bend and twist their rigid arms and legs this way and that like robots suffering short circuits, and the music accompanying them sounds like blunt hard rock fed through a synthesiser. The end result is what you’d get if you asked Chat GPT to sing. In fact, Chat GPT could have been the composer of this whole alleged musical.

You should give Audiard a crumb of credit for thinking of combining a crime drama with a musical, but that’s it. You shouldn’t give him any credit for anything beyond thinking of the idea. He should have seen it wouldn’t work. It’s like feeding a toddler hard liquor. It’s impossible to take criminals seriously when they’re breaking into song every five minutes. Gangsters don’t sing. Nor are slums, drug deals and mass murder the type of stuff you’d expect people to sing and dance about, unless you’re the Joker. It doesn’t look bizarre when characters sing and dance in a musical precisely because they’re singing and dancing on fields of sunflowers and the tops of wedding cakes. You can imagine you’d want to do the same if you were in their place. You can’t imagine doing it if you’re surrounded by junkies or corpses. If you want a sneak preview of Emilia Perez, watch the trailer for the 1976 gangster musical Bugsy Malone and watch the garish spectacle of kids playing murderous prohibition mobsters and their saucy moles.

It’s bizarre and not the kind of bizarre that works. It’s the bizarre of a crooked leer on some unfortunate gargoyle’s face.

You’re unlikely to have seen any film where so little effort has gone to making a film that actually works much less entertains you. Go and see Emilia Perez and one hour in you’ll be waiting for it to end.