FILM
EMILIA PÉREZ
MAMMA MIA!, THIS AIN’T
Ex-cartel boss Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón). Below: Lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña).
Ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez).
★★★
OUT 25 OCTOBER / CERT TBC / 132 MINS
DIRECTOR
Jacques Audiard
CAST
Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, Édgar Ramírez
PLOT
Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña), a lawyer in Mexico City, is forced into taking an unexpected job: arranging for a gang leader (Gascón) to transition into becoming a woman.
HERE IS AN unusual film from a restless mind. French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s eclectic career has already seen a gritty prison drama (A Prophet), a comedy Western (The Sisters Brothers) and a romantic drama about orcas (Rust And Bone). His latest, Emilia Pérez, is part drugcartel gangland thriller, part trans coming-of-age drama, part grand melodrama, and part opera libretto musical. It’s nothing if not unique. Zoe Saldaña stars as an exhausted, hard-working lawyer in Mexico City, too busy to have a life of her own. Then one day she is kidnapped on the streets by machine-gunwielding gangsters and bustled into a van. But the kidnapping is not a death sentence or a hostage situation: instead, it’s an unlikely (and compulsory) job offer. She is to organise and oversee the transition of a fearsome cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón), who wishes to fake her own death and begin a new life as a woman.