STARTING OVER
IN EMILIA PÉREZ, A BRUTAL CARTEL LEADER BEGINS A NEW LIFE AS A MUCH HAPPIER WOMAN. AND FOR THE CAST AND C R EW, THE FILM WA S AN OPPORTUNITY TO PLUNGE INTO UNCHARTED TERRITORY
WORDS OLLY RICHARDS
Lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldaña) works it
Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) and Epifanía (Adriana Paz) get close
Emilia wakes up to a new start.
Jessi feeling it
Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez) and Jessi (Selena Gomez) hit the town
Emilia and Rita are in the spotlight
Writer-director Jacques Audiard (right) on set
BEFORE ANYONE HAD EVEN SET FOOT IN front of a camera, Jacques Audiard knew he was risking disaster. And this is not a director afraid of big swings. Audiard has danced through multiple genres in his career, from the BAFTA-winning prison drama A Prophet; to Rust And Bone, a romance about a woman who loses her legs in her work as an orca-trainer; to the eccentric Western The Sisters Brothers. But with Emilia Pérez he’s swinging like never before.
This is the audacious story of a low-grade lawyer in Mexico City employed to help a cartel leader lead a new life as a woman. That is just the first act. Also, it’s a musical. And almost entirely in Spanish, which Audiard doesn’t speak. “There were many, many, many things that could have not worked,” he says, speaking from his home in France, via an interpreter. “It mixes lots of things. It could be kitsch. Or in very bad taste.” Arguably, it flirts with both those things, but it is also so much more.
Emilia Pérez,
fittingly, took some time to find its truest form. In, probably, 2019 (by his own admission, he is not good with dates), Audiard read Ecoute, a French novel by Boris Razon, about an unhappy police officer surveilling the people around him. One part in particular stuck with the filmmaker. “In this one chapter there was a man, a Mexican drug dealer, who wants to become a woman,” he says. “This character was never developed, so I decided to take it on myself.” Audiard was attracted to the surface contradictions and the questions it made him ask himself. “There was an interesting paradox in the proposition. This person who is hyper-violent, hyper-macho, and hyper-virile wants to become a woman.”