by Julian Wood

Year:  2024

Director:  Jacques Audiard

Rated:  MA

Release:  16 January 2025

Distributor: Kismet

Running time: 122 minutes

Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth

Cast:
Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez, Edgar Ramirez

Intro:
... has to be experienced (and preferably on the big screen).

Cinema is an infinitely renewable art form. As with a kaleidoscope, a slight twist can make the same ingredients form into a new pattern. This is certainly true of this bold and colourful film set in Mexico.

Describing the plot won’t take us very far into the heart of the film because there are so many layers. Is it a crime story? Is it a musical? Is it Queer cinema? All of the above perhaps. The first of the two main protagonists is Rita (Zoe Saldana, showing a new range here). Initially, Rita is a pencil-skirted lawyer for hire, but she is already tiring of the corporate bullshit. When she is approached indirectly to work for a senior gang boss, Manitas (the extraordinary Karla Sofia Gascon), she decides to take a risk and ends up in strange places, both actually and morally. The film never judges her or any of the other characters. This is a risk from eclectic French director Jacques Audiard, as he has to contend with our residual feelings that the drug traffickers depend on violence and the misery of others for their lifestyle. A gangster turning away from gangsterism isn’t suddenly a good person, although Manitas’ personal journey is certainly engrossing. On top of these moral complexities, the film veers off into another territory with its queer aspects. To explore this here would risk spoilers but you can tell that it will help the film gather an enthusiastic young audience for whom these gender issues are the backbone of a whole new cultural politics.

Audiard is such an adventurous and original director. He made the riveting Rust and Bone (2012) with Marion Cotillard and Mathias Schoenarts, and radically undid the Western with Sisters Brothers (2018), based on Patrick deWitt’s novel of the same name. He hasn’t made a dull film yet.

Emilia Perez has to be experienced (and preferably on the big screen). If you are looking for logical and a straight narrative, then possibly this is not for you – or, it will blow your mind open! For many others it will be a revelation. It certainly offers a view of Mexico and its relation to America that we haven’t seen in quite this way before.

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