Emilia Pérez by Jacques Audiard is a candidate to be the symbolic film of 2025. After having made everyone agree at Cannes 2024, where it was presented as a world premiere, obtaining the consensus of the public and critics and having triumphed at the last Golden Globes, this mix between musical, melodrama and narco movie, crossed by the theme of the LGBT community, is without a doubt a wonderful surprise. In theaters from January 9th.

Emilia Pérez – the plot

Emilia Pérez introduces us to Rita Castro (Zoe Saldana), legal assistant of a prestigious Mexican lawyer, whose life is stingy with satisfaction. Underpaid, without a sentimental and social life, she is looking for an opportunity for redemption. This appears in the form of the feared Juan Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a feared drug boss.

The surprise, however, comes when Juan offers Rita a fortune, as long as she helps him find someone who can help him complete his transition from man to woman, and secure his family in Switzerland, formed by his wife Jessi ( Selena Gomez) and two children. They will never know that Juan has changed sex and has made a new life elsewhere, they will be made to believe that he is dead, and Rita will have a fortune with which she will change her life. However, Emilia Pérez, this is the new identity of the boss, turns up again after a few years with Rita, asking her to help her reconnect with her family, obviously in different guises and without revealing her previous identity.

From that moment on, however, everything will change, she herself will see Mexico differently, where her past will torment her but will result in pushing her towards a redemption that is both radical and has unpredictable consequences. Emilia Pérez bears the signature of Jacques Audiard, also author of the screenplay, who creates an absolutely atypical musical, a hybrid work, dominated by a Zoe Saldana in great form.

The former Guardian of the Galaxy dances, sings, but above all she is our guide into a world in which the concept of transformation is the true, great, dominant theme of a film that can be sometimes tender and other times scary, which wrings the watch out for melodrama or even more so for the telenovelas she comes from: Karla Sofía Gascón. Star of the small screen and of Spanish telenovelas, she is the other star of a film where it is difficult to decide which of the two is better, but one thing is certain: Emilia Pérez is very particular, she manages to combine civil narration with comedy, and at the net of some forcing in the screenplay, it also knows how to be romantic without falling into an excess of sentimentality.

A hybrid film that knows how to talk about transformation and identity

However, Emilia Pérez tackles in an absolutely clear way the drama of the Mexican desaparecidos, of those who for one reason or another ended up in mass graves or disappeared completely in the war of the drug cartels, those who for decades have made Mexico a gigantic carnage.

More similar to a sometimes dark fairy tale than a film to be taken completely seriously, Emilia Pérez works very well as a universal drama, it tells us about a person who feels halfway between two worlds, two identities, understood not only as those gender, but as his very essence as a human being. Her hands are stained with blood, the change she seeks will also lead her to be able to distance herself from everything that made her an instrument of death.

In all this, Selena Gomez plays the role of symbol of a Latin female identity still dominated by the man, not emancipated, who is looking for a new master to submit to, played here by Edgar Ramirez. Damien Jalet’s dance choreography is wonderful, Clément Ducol’s music and Camille’s songs are good.

Emilia Pérez is almost entirely performed in Spanish, and knows how to be both transversal and in more than one unique moment in how she portrays her characters. Net of an ending that could appear hasty and simplistic if desired, however, it is above all far from the ease and rhetorical conclusions that Hollywood likes so much.

Perfectly shot, also featuring beautiful photography, it will certainly take home something from this Cannes 2024, of which it represents, as far as the Official Competition is concerned, the sharpest in terms of audacity and energy, or in any case the cinematographic moment with the greatest impact for the critics and the public, who up until now have perhaps remained a little dry-mouthed.

Another interesting element is how, within a cinematography where minorities, in the most universal sense, are theoretically great protagonists, this film manages to bring new food for thought. Above all, it gives us a new representation of someone who has never felt in their life inside a body fitting their own identity. The miracle of Emilia Pérez is that she carries all this with sensitivity, imagination and sympathy.

Rating: 8