Let’s cut through the mariachi fireworks and that oily blast of DayGlo costumes: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is the sort of cinematic incident that makes you want to retroactively warn yourself away—like a bad tattoo or tequila made in a plastic barrel. “Where did the movies go wrong?” isn’t a question you ask as the credits roll, it’s a question you’re muttering thirty minutes into this so-called musical, when cultural resonance has been replaced by the clop-clop choreography of farce.
If the French ever feared falling into the quagmire of Hollywood B-movie insincerity, they can rest easy now—Audiard has kicked the door open and waltzed right in, armed with what he must believe are “important” societal messages, but what land on screen as a symphony of stereotypes and clattering, off-tune musical numbers. This is a film with the subtlety of a brass band marching through a convent, convinced it’s the Vatican Choir.
The premise, plucked quivering from the latest headline, ought to at least provoke thought: a cartel boss transitions and reinvents herself as a woman—surely a minefield of identity, gender, violence, and redemption. Did I say minefield? Make that a sandbox, with papier-mâché explosives set by screenwriters who confuse drama for earnest PowerPoint slides. Every time the narrative itches toward confrontation, toward texture, Audiard rushes to douse it with another uninflected lyric or vapid one-liner. By the fourth musical interlude you’d sell your grandmother for a working mute button.
Let’s hand it to Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón—the pair wring a kind of desperate dignity from the flimsy pop-tart crust of a script that expects its actors to perform rocket surgery with a butter knife. But before you can be seduced by the possibility of actual character development, Emilia Pérez yanks out its ace: Selena Gomez, pop princess, inheriting all the expectations of a midnight headliner and delivering—what, exactly? Karaoke night at the Applebee’s on the highway to nowhere. There’s a cameo scene meant to be a delirious musical face-off, but instead it’s an echoing cavern of missed notes and dying enthusiasm, the kind of performance that might drive the most forgiving audience to tears—the “let’s leave at intermission” kind.
I waited for Selena to melt into her star power, to sweep the film up and carry it above this morass of plodding choreography and rhinestone banality. Yet her numbers land with a nervous thud: music here is plaster peeled in a strip mall bathroom, not the breathless Technicolor of vintage MGM. You wonder if the filmmakers’ pitch was simply, “She’s famous, therefore she sings, therefore it works.” It doesn’t, and no amount of bravado from the cast’s veterans can paper over that void.
Here’s the comedy: Emilia Pérez desperately wants to be about something. Gender identity! The pain of cartel violence! Social activism in a world rotting from institutional abuse! But every time it lobs a “serious” scene into the ring—Emilia’s nonprofit, Epifanía’s dime-store tragedy—the film flees from real engagement, content to skate over the roughest topics like a tour bus that promises “authentic” flavor but never lets you off for more than a souvenir photo. It’s as if the screenplay was torn from a Wikipedia summary and sent to a translation app run by an intern with bad WiFi.
When did Mexican grief become a musical chew-toy for European art cinema, anyway? The moments meant to register as grand tragedy come and go as if Audiard were ticking items off his “controversial theme” checklist. No scene is allowed its own weather. It’s all flash, all surface—the swirling costumes, the drag-pose posturing, a palette so fluorescent you could use it to flag down helicopters. But the canvas underneath is blank. Humor is rationed out in gags so broad you feel they were workshopped at a corporate retreat, and the “deep” moments evaporate before your eyes. The result is an emotional flatline, colored in with edible glitter.
And so, infamously, to the music: original songs by Camille—if only “original” meant “memorable.” The lyrics limp, the melodies skitter and die, and the choreography (by Damien Jalet, who must have conducted rehearsals through a bathroom wall) is the kind of fever dream that makes you wish for real fever. Were they singing off-key as a pointed irony, or had no one in the studio considered, even whimsically, to let the pop star sing in tune? “Take two” seems to have been struck from the shooting schedule. Here, dissonance is high art—or maybe just accidental dishonesty, the kind you want to laugh at but are too numb to muster a reaction beyond the theatrical sigh.
It lands, in the end, as a production that so mistakes noise for energy that it’s convinced a confetti cannon can stand in for melody, and a glimmering set for insight. Turn off the sound and you might think you were watching the best music video reject reel that 2024 could muster: jittery, crammed, and hollow to the core.
Watching Emilia Pérez is like wandering into an “immersive” cultural event designed by people who once watched a telenovela after midnight and now think they understand sorrow, laughter, and redemption—“Let’s put it in a musical! But make it woke! But don’t dig too deep! Give Selena a hand mic and tell her to improvise.” The result is both heavy-handed and feather-brained, a superficial shout drowned out by its own clanging, semi-ironic soundtrack. The truest note comes as the credits roll, and you realize you feel nothing but bruised by bafflement.
If this is what passes for cultural engagement in 2024—a ticklish, tuneless carnival ride aimed squarely at international juries and streaming algorithms—then heaven help us. Emilia Pérez is less a celebration than a symptom, a party where the music is so bad, the costumes so dazzling, and the point so lost that everyone leaves with a headache and a vague conviction that something important was attempted, and utterly, gloriously botched.
A trash musical for the Hall of Fame, if only because it leaves us mourning for the films it pretends to love, the cultures it pretends to honor, and the voices—on pitch or off—that deserved so much better.
