Save for Karla Sofía Gascón's performance, Emilia Pérez's ambitions are undercut by staggeringly generic execution

Emilia Pérez begins with lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) bemoaning her lot in life. She's barely making much money and the clients she works for often make her stomach turn. Then, out of the blue, she gets a phone call. It's from a mysterious voice offering her untold riches. Desperate to have financial freedom, she accepts an offer that turns out to be from a famous drug lord. This figure reveals that she wants to fully transition into presenting as a woman full-time, an ambition that entails her starting a new life elsewhere.

Castro completes her mission for this formidable figure responsible for so much violence and carnage. Eventually, this woman takes on the name Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) and leaves her old life behind, including two kids and wife Jessie Del Monte (Selena Gomez). Four years later, Pérez reunites with Castro and presents her with a new proposition. The two will return to Mexico, complete with Monte and her offspring in tow. Now posing as “Aunt Pérez”, Emilia is trying to bridge the gap between her old and new life.

Out of all his previous movies, the Audiard feature Emilia Pérez most evokes is his 2018 English-language motion picture The Sisters Brothers. Like Pérez, The Sisters Brothers explored middle-aged killers contemplating whether there’s an escape from a life of brutality and bullets. Sisters Brothers, though, had a more laidback glacial pacing even when its lead characters were intimidating innocent civilians. Emilia Pérez, meanwhile, has rapid-fire pacing that proves fatal. Rather than reminding one of Audiard's smart co-screenwriting chops on A Prophet, Pérez conjures up memories of overly hurried musical biopics in covering so much narrative territory in one movie.

The screenplay’s second half especially suffers from this problem, as Pérez rapidly oscillates between her desire to reunite with her old family and a newfound penchant for activism. Both of these narrative threads are smushed together and never feel fully developed in Audiard’s hands. This includes an awkwardly-introduced stab at pathos involving surviving relatives of "the disappeared". The experiences of such souls have informed many great narrative and documentary films. Here, they're mostly relegated to background players (save for one quick song) so that the store can focus on more financially well-off characters. If Emilia Pérez took a moment to relax and just let things simmer, people speaking for "the disappeared" could've been developed as flesh and blood people. Instead, they, like other supporting characters such as baddie Gustavo Brun (Édgar Ramírez) or Pérez’s sons, register as nothing more than a blur. There are lots of people on-screen in Emilia Pérez. Few leave an impact as fully realized human beings.

The half-baked nature of this movie extends to the oddly realized musical numbers. Camille-penned songs are a fixture of Emilia Pérez, though they’re certainly not traditional show tunes in lyrics. More often, they harken back to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in rendering conversations between characters as harmonies. An argument between Castor and Israeli surgeon Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), for instance, devolves into the duo singing their positions. Key emotional moments between characters see them crooning their lines at one another. However, even evoking that Jacques Demy's motion picture doesn’t quite paint an accurate portrait of this Audiard movie. Everything in Cherbourg was sung. Most of Pérez is comprised of standard speaking dialogue. The songs actually vanish for much of the third act, believe it or not.

Kudos to Audiard and company for coming up with a movie musical form that doesn’t immediately have a lot of predecessors. Unlike Joker: Folie a Deux, Emilia Pérez also isn’t afraid to indulge in preposterous flourishes like elaborate physicality or crowds of backup dancers for its big melody-driven sequences. The instrumental accompaniment to many of these tunes is also admirably bold, brash, and full of energy. Too bad, though, the songs are frustratingly generic. Camille’s lyrics simply aren’t very interesting, even when dealing with very heightened subject matter. There's a bouncy beat to certain tracks, but such sounds are servicing sometimes downright insipid writing.

A Bangkok-set tune entitled “La Vaginoplastia”, for instance, is set in a hospital specializing in gender-reaffirming surgery. This backdrop should be an opportunity for some inspired wordplay. Perhaps some trans singers could show up to deliver some lovely vocals and cheeky lyrics. Instead, this song is just a bunch of cis-people singing phrases like “from woman to man, man to woman” over and over again with little variety. Shortly after, Castor and Wasserman belt out a ditty where the latter character sings about how “you can’t change the soul” with gender-reaffirming medical care. Castor, meanwhile, reaffirms her pro-trans bina fidas, complete with turning to the camera to implore non-cis viewers that “I’ll always fight for you!” One of her lines in this tune gives the trans community its equivalent to “love is love is love”. Finally. Marsha P. Johnson would be proud.

Unimaginative writing plagues too many Emilia Pérez songs. To boot, the brevity of these tunes rarely lets them develop immediately striking personalities. Further curbing the impact of these musical numbers is how they’re realized on-screen. Setting so many of these musical numbers against pitch-black backdrops becomes a frustrating motif rather than an exciting visual fixture. Audiard and editor Juliette Welfling, meanwhile, chop up these song-and-dance routines into bits with ceaseless cuts. This quality even undercuts more dynamic set pieces like "Mi Camino." Sung by Monte and Brun in a karaoke bar, this ditty features a dazzling neon-lit backdrop hinging heavily on endless reflections of the two characters in surrounding mirrors. It’d be easier to appreciate this dynamite background, though, if Welfling and Audiard didn't constantly cut to a new shot.

These songs and the rest of Emilia Pérez employ some truly strange camerawork courtesy of Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume. The most striking camera movement in the whole movie is a recurring tendency to suddenly pull the camera in tight on the faces of characters like Castro. Otherwise, little ingenuity seeps into the blocking and framing. It's astonishing how little personality manifests in the way characters are arranged on-screen. This is the most frustrating element of Emilia Pérez. Its color scheme and lighting choices are disappointingly derivative. Minimal bright hues dominate this world while tremendously dim lighting renders a climactic nighttime gunfight frequently incomprehensible.

For such an offbeat narrative meant to turn heads and drop jaws, Emilia Pérez leans too much into the expected musically, visually, and narratively. Audiard’s grimy visions of Bangkok or Mexican streets, for instance, is typical of so many European/American films chronicling “foreign” lands. Depictions of tattooed criminals or gun-wielding mercenaries, meanwhile, could be cribbed from any 21st-century drama about the “war on drugs”. Characters like Castro, Monte, and Pérez speak of subverting the status quo in their dialogue. However, their roles in Emilia Pérez’s third act fall into very expected archetypes for women characters in mainstream cinema. Even the screenplay’s very broad moralistic strokes feel too safe. Jacques Audiard talks a big game with Emilia Perez. However, he can’t walk the chaotic subversive walk that this movie needs to thrive.

If anything in the movie registers as deeply complicated and richly human, it’s Karla Sofía Gascón’s lead performance. Not since Gugu Mbatha-Raw perfectly channeled 1940s film noir leading ladies in the horrendously boring Motherless Brooklyn has performance been so overqualified for the feature it inhabits. When Pérez first reunites with Castro, she sings about how she’s doing psychologically after transitioning into sarcastic language. In her vocal deliveries, Gascón mesmerizes. The sheer volume of nuanced emotions and years of experience she injects into each word Pérez says is remarkable. Her depiction of Pérez tiptoeing around her words when speaking to Monte is similarly rife with fascinating layers.

Gascón flourishes at turning her character into something emotionally tangible. Emilia Pérez as a whole film, though, settles for giving audiences what they’re familiar with. The assorted musical numbers are too brief and generically written to reach the loopy creative heights of other dark modern musicals like The Lure. Visually, Emilia Pérez simply harkens back to pre-existing movies rather than conjuring up bold new images. Plus, Audiard’s screenplay treads mighty familiar territory for movies about trans people from cis-artists.

Once again, surgeries and medical procedures are a primary object of fascination for non-trans filmmakers. Emilia Pérez is also yet another trans-centric not only told through a cis-het character’s eyes but also inhabiting a universe where only one trans person exists. These faults signify a larger creative rot. This unwillingness to depart from cinema’s trans-oriented norms seeps into the rest of the project. There's inescapable listlessness here where there should be brash confidence. Gascón’s Emilia Pérez performance radiates commitment. She deserved a significantly better motion picture to anchor. After this, Mean Girls, and Joker: Folie a Deux, all our hopes and dreams travel with you Wicked to salvage 2024's musical cinema track record.