The tale of a vicious cartel boss who undergoes gender-affirming surgery, Emilia Pérez places women front and center in a traditionally male-led gangster genre. But rather than subverting its visual and tonal hallmarks, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard compliments them with a liberating sense of expression through song and dance.
The Spanish-language Cannes title not only won Audiard the Jury Prize — the festival’s third most prestigious accolade — but it was also awarded the Best Actress trophy to not one but four of its central performances, each of which brings a unique thoughtfulness and passion to the screen. Part throwback musical and part modern cartel saga, the Dheepan director’s audacious blend is about the transgender experience in thorny ways, but it finds a deft balance between energetic filmmaking and intimate drama.
What is Emilia Pérez about?
Credit: Cannes Film Fesitval
Dreamlike landscape shots of a nebulous Mexican city — the film was largely shot in France — fade and overlap as we’re slowly lowered onto streets overrun with violent crime. Rita (Zoe Saldaña), an overworked, underappreciated corporate defense attorney, is part of the problem. She’s a cynical cog in a brutal machine, and her job is getting killers off the hook. It’s a premise she introduces to us firsthand via a snappy dance number in the tight confines of a public market, where she’s promptly joined by extras.
Soon, Rita is presented a deal with a devil: the vicious wanted criminal Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (transgender telenovela star Karla Sofía Gascón), who, midway through the movie, changes her name to Emilia Pérez and adopts a whole new identity. Emilia wants Rita to help her evade authorities by researching an expensive and secretive gender-affirming surgery, and by recruiting discreet international experts. The procedure, however, is no mere excuse or easy escape hatch from her life of crime. Rather, it’s been her deep desire for many years — Emilia has also covertly begun hormone replacement therapy — and it just so happens to align with her need to leave her life of crime in her rearview.
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When she was living as Manitas, Emilia was perceived to be a tough-as-nails cartel boss who built an empire on blood. Its foundations, which she relays to the audience by singing in despondent whispers, involved leaning into society’s violent masculine expectations for the sake of survival. Now, upon undergoing a series of simultaneous surgeries — which receive their own informative musical number, courtesy of some excitable Thai surgeons — her plan also includes faking her own death in the eyes of the law. In order to fully shed her past, she wants to “kill” Manitas, and have Rita evacuate her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two adolescent kids to Switzerland, where they’ll be safe and none the wiser about Emilia’s new life and identity.
All’s well that ends well… That is, until Emilia — having fully transitioned — resurfaces several years down the line in the hopes of reuniting with her family. For this mission to bring Jessi and her kids to Mexico, Emilia once again conscripts the resourceful Rita, though both women have since turned over new leaves, making their return to Mexico (and to the thick of cartel activity, where Manitas is still wanted) a challenging conundrum. What follows is a complicated and often amusing plot in which Emilia reintroduces herself to her kids as their long-lost aunt, while also embarking on a pilgrimage of rigorous social work alongside Rita to clean up Mexico’s top-down corruption, if only so that both women can atone for their sins.
These acts of repentance come wrapped in wildly energetic musical numbers that leap off the screen, as the camera jostles and swerves to keep pace. All the while, the film asks intriguing philosophical questions about the mind, body, and soul, as they pertain to its genre lens.
Emilia Pérez is a charged transgender tale of remorse.
Until she undergoes her affirming procedures, nearly every character in the film (including her surgeon, and even Emilia herself) refers to her with male pronouns, as though Manitas were a distinct entity whose life ends when Emilia’s begins. While trans people generally use pronouns that align with their gender regardless of their desire for (or access to) gender-affirming care, perhaps the movie’s 72-year-old cisgender director, and its numerous cis writers and producers, aren’t up to date on the terminology, though Emilia hints at having experienced dysphoria as a child. However, her being older and more isolated from trans issues and communities also means she lacks the necessary language to define her deep-seated feelings and experiences. So, this imaginary dividing line between Manitas and Emilia becomes a vital dramatic question.
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Conversations between Rita and the doctors she interviews are rife with differing perspectives about physical transformation representing metaphysical good, and about the ways in which gender dysphoria can be relieved through physical means. If the film, as a political entity, ought to be judged on its approach to trans people irrespective of its language, then it’s ostensibly in the right, and only introduces these dueling questions as a means to channel Emilia’s spiritual dilemma.
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While gender-affirming surgery is something she wants, in order to escape, and needs, in order to survive as her true self, it’s also something she hopes will relieve her of her ethical burdens as a ruthless killer — as though Manitas were some uncomfortable temporary skin she could simply shed. Gascón even embodies this idea when she first appears as the gruff and grizzled Manitas onscreen. The actress’s prosthetic nose (i.e. the character’s “real” nose, pre-rhinoplasty) sits uncomfortably on her face, while the contours of her beard and unkempt, mane-like wig are visible to the naked eye. It’s as though we were seeing Emilia the way she sees herself: performing maleness, and being forced to pretend in order to survive.
If anything, the outdated idea that she “was a man” and “is now a woman” (according to some characters) is something she wishes were true, if only to rationalize her life as having a distinct “before” and “after” point — for her spirit, as represented by her body — between Manitas and Emilia. The more modern way we understand gender and identity, wherein Emilia has been the same person all along, is not something she herself can sit with, even though she claims to have recognized this about herself from an early age. Her transformation may be life-affirming, and even life-saving, but it cannot possibly provide her with the absolution she desires. This, in turn, portends the aforementioned tale of Emilia and Rita trying to confront their sins by exposing the metaphorical and literal skeletons they once helped bury.
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Transgender opinions on the film are unlikely to be monolithic, but emphasis on the surgical aspect of the trans experience tends to be a reductive, retrograde cisgender fixation more often than not. However, in Emilia Pérez, these anxieties around the nitty-gritties of physical transformation become a key emotional focal point, over which Gascón pores in every scene and every quiet musical number. Her novel sense of gender euphoria remains shackled by a kind of moral dysphoria, having committed atrocities under a façade to which she can no longer relate, if she was ever able to in the first place. And yet, Manitas’ actions are a part of her too, even if they belong to a false version of herself.
While Emilia may be guilty from a legal standpoint, the ethics of her guilt, as imagined by Audiard’s drama, become infinitely more complicated. It’s as though her corrective physical metamorphosis had fallen tragically short of helping her purge herself of her misdeeds. However, on the other side of her social transition, she also finds renewed romance with a headstrong local woman on the run from her husband, Epifania (Adriana Paz) — a committed, loving performance that rounds out the quartet of Cannes winners — but the very idea of happiness becomes corrupted too, so long as Emilia’s past remains unconfronted. For instance, Jessi, who believes herself to be a widow, moves on romantically as well, leading to sparks of envy that anchor Emilia to her ugliest emotional tendencies.
But while all these ideas are all somewhat interesting, it’s the way in which Audiard assembles them — in the vein of a mid-2000s Hollywood thriller, imbued with raucous musical energy — that truly makes them sing.
Emilia Pérez is a stylistic triumph.
Credit: Cannes Film Festival
To liken crime movies and musicals to strictly “masculine” and “feminine” forms of cinema might sound reductive, but this traditional genre binary is key to Audiard’s artistic approach. These respective modes, each repressive and expressive in their own right, inform the ways his actors move through space, and the way he captures them doing so.
For one thing, Emilia Pérez resembles the highly saturated war-on-drugs/war-on-terror studio films produced in America at the turn of the century. Its intimate, shaky camerawork and high-contrast shadows create a sickly feel akin to Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic or Tony Scott’s Déjà Vu, hi-octane thrillers in which you can practically smell the gasoline radiating off people’s skin, thanks to their overblown visual highlights (including on Black skin; something Déjà Vu and Emilia Pérez have in common). These are the kinds of films where it feels like the light source is everywhere, all at once, reflecting off people’s bodies at all times — if not emanating from them in the first place.
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Audiard and cinematographer Paul Guilhaume take full advantage of these familiar textures and conventions as soon as they begin blending the aforementioned approach — an ostensibly more “realistic” one — with the theatrical expressionism of dance. The harsh highlights become spotlights, as the film’s luminous characters begin to control the fabric of the frame. Their movements determine whether people around them are still or in motion. Routine activities take on musical rhythms. Personal confrontations in public settings determine whether or not other characters are lit at all. These are women fighting for agency in harsh environments, and their aesthetic control over the space around them ends up a particularly fitting depiction of this idea.
While the film has lengthy stretches without musical numbers, and features a few laments with rusty delivery that it could’ve probably done without, there are just as many songs that are exciting and emotionally rousing. (Some tracks are mercifully rapped, rather than sung, by actors with less vocal training.) One in particular, a rock opera ballad which unfolds just as Rita begins turning over a new leaf, sees Saldaña dancing across a series of expensive banquet tables. While she’s invisible to its lavish guests — corrupt politicians and police personnel she now hopes to take down — her pulsating movements practically force them to move and convulse to the beat as well. Others finally have no choice but to dance to her tune. It’s one of the most fist-pumping cinematic moments this year.
However, no matter who’s on screen, Emilia remains the focal point around whom everyone’s story pivots — whether it heads toward catharsis, tragedy, or both. She represents, in microcosm, the transformative nature of fictional characters at large, and ends up embodying a novel narrative tension through her transgender experience: between physical and emotional metamorphosis, a dramatic disconnect that becomes the catalyst for nearly every scene and song.
Above all else, the film’s four leading ladies are perfectly attuned to Audiard’s volatile mixture of operatic emotion and naturalistic cinematic influence. The result is a dazzling, dramatic high-wire act that’s always fun to watch, and is frequently invigorating, too. While its combination of styles and subject matter could’ve been picked out of a hat, Emilia Pérez sees Audiard sorting through a fog of risky, seemingly immiscible ideas to deliver a queer Molotov cocktail.
Emilia Pérez was reviewed out of the Cannes Film Festival.
A Wes Anderson film is always an uphill battle for me. I put that out in front here so you can understand where I’m coming from in this review. While I think his sensibilities lend quite nicely to animation, and I’ve really enjoyed both Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, Anderson in live action is very much a mixed bag. I always keep an open mind, but his batting average with me is quite low. For every movie that works on me, like The Royal Tenenbaums or The Grand Budapest Hotel, there’s the rest, which leave me just shrugging my shoulders. Recently, Anderson made one film I didn’t care for at all in The French Dispatch (reviewed here), as well as one that nearly won me over in Asteroid City (reviewed here). Now, with The Phoenician Scheme, I was wondering whether he’d get me over the edge and back on his side, or fall back on the things that annoy me. Unfortunately, while there’s some solid humor on display, as well as the normal pristine visuals, it once again feels like watching him play with a diorama. I felt nothing, which means the flick has failed.
The Phoenician Scheme starts with a little bit of novelty from Anderson, which I appreciated, but before long, it’s the same old story. By the end, there’s a little diorama on the screen, which I don’t think is meant as a joke. As always, I can appreciate the singularity of his vision, as well as understand why it works on some folks, while getting absolutely zilch out of the experience. Aside from a few laughs and appreciation of craft, I sit stone-faced, which is a real shame.
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Ruthless and wealthy international businessman Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio del Toro) seems to be pulling the world’s strings however he pleases. He also repeated survives assassination attempts, suggesting that not everyone is thrilled with how he’s in such control. After one such attempt, he decides that he wants an heir, not just to his company, but to his power as well. While he was married three times and has nine young sons living in a dorm near his estate, he opts for his daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), who he sent to a convent as a young girl. Liesl is about to become a nun and has no use for any of this, least of all her father, suspecting him of murdering her mother, but the prospect of solving that mystery, perhaps gaining vengeance in the process, is too good to pass up. So, father and daughter are reunited, with the children’s tutor Bjorn (Michael Cera), who immediately has fallen in love with Liesl, along for the ride.
Zsa-zsa’s competitors have conspired against him, raising the price of an item that’s created a massive financial gap, so the trio must travel to each party in order to negotiate better terms, as well as other methods for filling in the gap. While that’s going on, some mild father and daughter bonding results. Of course, the world is filled with others, from the competition (played by Bryan Cranston and Tom Hanks, to name two), to family (Benedict Cumberbatch), to the leader of a band of radicals in Sergio (Richard Ayoade) who want a revolution. It all builds and builds, but where it ends up will potentially leave you simply shrugging, like I did.
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Benicio del Toro does some very nice work here, as does Michael Cera and Mia Threapleton. They’re best in show, which is helpful considering they’re the three characters we spend the most time with. Watching del Toro get a showcase is admittedly a pleasure, while Threapleton has some definite acting chops. As for Cera, it’s wild that he and Anderson have not worked together yet, as he’s a strong fit for that style. In terms of the smaller roles/cameos, Jeffrey Wright steals his scene, cementing my theory that he should be the lead of an Anderson project one day. The aforementioned Richard Ayoade, Bryan Cranston, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Tom Hanks are all fine, though more or less just here because they enjoy Anderson. Supporting players here include stars like F. Murray Abraham, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, Willem Dafoe, Hope Davis, Rupert Friend, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Scarlett Johansson, and Bill Murray, plus many more.
Wes Anderson directs a screenplay he wrote with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola, and while some of the surprising violence is pretty funny, the whole thing does feel a bit stale. The visuals from Bruno Delbonnel and the score by Alexandre Desplat are Anderson approved, so if you appreciate his work, you’ll like what they’re up to even more. The failing here, besides the general twee feeling that I get from Anderson, is that Anderson and Coppola clearly want you invested in the family story. Especially considering where it leaves off, the intent is undeniable. The thing is, it just never sucks you in. You’re kept at a distance, admiring the pretty images, but never really caring much about the machinations of the plot, which is wildly obtuse and overcomplicated, let alone the characters within.
The Phoenician Scheme left me cold, which is a shame considering its hopes to have an emotional core on display. All in all, this is Wes Anderson up to his old tricks. Whether that’s a promise or a threat is a matter of perspective. It’s clear where I fall on this, but your mileage may vary. If you’re a fan, prepare to enjoy some more of Anderson’s antics. If not, well…at least you know what to expect.
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD is a horror comedy. Quinn, a female teenager, and her father, a doctor, move into Kettle Springs, a small town in the American heartland, far from their old Philadelphia home. They’re seeking a new start after Quinn’s mom died. The dying town once had a thriving factory with a giant sinister-looking clown as its mascot. Quinn quickly makes friends. After the annual Founders Day celebration, she sneaks out to attend a teenage party, where a horde of killer clowns emerge from the surrounding cornfield to kill everyone.
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD features a smart script with surprising character depth, plenty of twists, darkly funny lines, and a positive father-daughter relationship. The filmmakers assemble an appealing young cast with Katie Douglas as the lead, and a terrific Aaron Abrams as her father. The story moves like a freight train. However, it’s marred by a strong Romantic, politically correct, abhorrent worldview with a negative, politically correct view of Small Town America. CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD also has frequent foul language, graphic violence, and two teenage boys who resume a homosexual relationship.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Very strong Romantic, politically correct worldview with an Anti-American, politically correct view of small-town America (the villains turn out to be “strict” adults) and a developing homosexual relationship between two male teenagers (they kiss romantically near the end of the movie), but there’s a strong and positive father-daughter relationship;
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Foul Language:
At least 52 obscenities (including at least 35 “f” words), and one “I swear to G*d” profanity;
Violence:
Numerous graphic killings in extremely unique ways, with lots of blood showing and splattering, most kills cut away from the actual murderous act and leave it to the imagination, many are portrayed comically because they’re so outlandish, two people get impaled on pitchforks, two are decapitated, a girl is electro-shocked but not killed, a villain is smashed by a car, and his blood drenches the windshield, one teenage boy gets eviscerated with his intestines pulled out, a villain is stabbed in the neck by a person acting in self-defense, a father tries to kill his teenage son by hanging him;
Sex:
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A clothed teenage girl jumps on her teenage neighbor to his surprise and starts passionately kissing him and making it clear she wants intimate sex, but the guy stops her by admitting he’s actually a closeted homosexual, and he and another teenage male kiss romantically, and their relationship is affirmed by other people;
Nudity:
A teenage male is shirtless while doing bodybuildng exercises;
Alcohol Use:
Lots of teenagers drink alcohol at parties;
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Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
Some teenagers are shown smoking marijuana; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
Two adult authority figures are revealed to be part of a group of murderous adults, and teenage girl sneaks out of her house to attend a teenage party.
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD is a fast-moving, comical horror movie in the vein of the SCREAM movies, in which teenagers and a new doctor in a small rural town must fight a small group of people dressing up as clowns and brutally murdering the town’s most rebellious high school students. CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD features a smart script with some surprising character depth and a positive father-daughter relationship, but it’s marred by a strong Romantic, politically correct, abhorrent worldview with a negative portrayal of Small Town America, frequent foul language, graphic violence, and two major teenage male characters who begin to develop a homosexual relationship during the movie’s story.
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Teenager Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas) and her father Dr. Glen Maybrook (Aaron Abrams) move into the small town of Kettle Springs in the American heartland, far from their old home in Philadelphia. They’re seeking a new start after Quinn’s mom died from a drug overdose. Quinn hates the small town, but she’s trying to help her father and is soon to graduate high school and go away to attend college anyway.
Quinn quickly meets her neighbor, Rust, a muscular guy with extremely awkward social skills, who warns her to steer clear of their school’s most popular clique. However, through a comical misunderstanding with a harsh teacher, Quinn winds up sharing detention with Cole, a good-looking guy who’s also the son of the town’s richest man. They have an instant attraction, and Quinn finds herself hanging out with his popular crowd after all, while learning that the dying town used to have a thriving factory called Baypen that had a sinister-looking giant clown as its mascot.
The factory burned down years ago, but the clown still is a menacing presence in the town. In fact, as shown in the movie’s opening sequence, the clown has been killing teenagers for decades. When Cole throws a big overnight teenage party after the town’s Founders Day celebration, Quinn sneaks out of her home and into the party – only to find a horde of killer clowns coming out of the surrounding cornfield and her friends fighting for their lives.
With her father also battling the killer clowns in order to save her, will the teenagers survive the night? Will she find new love with Cole? Can she and her father find a new start?
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD has an amazingly positive portrayal of Quinn’s father, and the other entertaining filmmaking qualities mentioned above. Co-writer/director Eli Craig rose to cult popularity with his movie TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL, which had a similar mix of outrageous mirth and murder back in 2010. Here, he assembles an appealing young cast led by Katie Douglas as teenage lead Quinn, and a terrific Aaron Abrams performance as her dad. The script has plenty of twists and darkly funny lines, and the direction moves this movie forward like a freight train.
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Of course, a major problem with a slasher comedy like this is all the graphic, bloody violence. For example, people are impaled on pitchforks or lose their heads literally. That’s par for the course for this genre, and the regrettably frequent foul language is another concern.
The biggest problem with CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD, however, lies in its Romantic, politically correct worldview. For example, the movie has a Romantic worldview with a strongly negative view of small town American life. The killers are adults who hate the fact that some of the town’s teenagers don’t appreciate the town where they live. Also, two of the town’s best-known teenage guys “come out” and admit they’ve been homosexual lovers in the past. At the end of the movie, they restart their relationship with a passionate romantic kiss in front of other teenagers. This scene is unnecessarily pushing the homosexual agenda on impressionable teenage viewers.
Thus, media-wise viewers will avoid CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD. The movie is to be viewed only, if at all, by adult and older teenager with extreme caution.
With nearly three hours of runtime and a plot that twists itself into knots, the latest instalment in the Mission franchise tests both Ethan Hunt’s endurance—and ours
The Snapshot: ‘The Final Reckoning’ aims high with explosive set pieces and emotional farewells—but gets bogged down by an overly complicated narrative that may leave audiences scratching their heads.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
7 out of 10
PG, 2hrs 50mins. Action Spy Drama.
Co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie.
Starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Esai Morales, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny and Angela Bassett.
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Now Playing at Galaxy Cinemas Sault Ste. Marie.
If you don’t feel exhausted watching Tom Cruise and his unparalleled stunts in the new Mission: Impossible 8, you’ll definitely be exhausted by it’s unnecessary three hour run time. Matter of fact, the only thing that’s even longer is the full title.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is the apparent end to the now 30-year-old spy franchise that redefined what was possible in the craftsmanship of stunts and action sequences in Hollywood.
For a grand finale, however, Cruise and returning director Christopher McQuarrie have crafted a film that is surprisingly devoid of stunts and action scenes. When the big scenes happen – boy do they deliver. The infrequency just feels a bit disappointing.
Despite excellent production and attention to detail in its convoluted, sluggish story, this latest entry (McQuarrie’s fourth in the franchise, starting with 2015’s Rogue Nation) is bogged down by long stretches of exposition and name-dropping that will confuse 99 per cent of the audience.
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The main conflict, of Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his elite team trying to stop a dangerous AI from activating missiles and starting a nuclear war, far-fetched even when it began in 2023’s previous film Dead Reckoning; sort of a part one to this movie.
Read more here: Tom Cruise’s Dead Reckoning? An impressive, impossible mission
Yet the last film was far more successful in balancing scenes of dialogue and discovery with the perilous, impossible stunts that action fans are here for. Not only was Dead Reckoning easier to understand – it was also plainly more entertaining.
If you can put aside the ludicrous plot and just focus on the simpler concept of “good spies versus bad spies,” the rest of Mission Impossible 8 still offers editing, acting and production scale far greater than most blockbusters these days.
While the whole ensemble is great, Cruise is clearly the worthy star, and his submarine rescue sequence mid-way through the film really is a true show-stopper. Great music, camerawork and editing give boundless energy to this nearly 15 minute dialogue free scene when Cruise really appears to do the impossible.
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The biplane chase and early prison break is also a highlight, though none of the stunts match the last film’s collapsing train escape that will likely keep it’s position at #1 for best in the series.
Having fun watching Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning really isn’t that hard: stop focusing on all the references from past movies and try to enjoy the action of the present.
Ethan Hunt’s mission is to show composure in the face of danger. Audiences who stay relaxed and open will truly succeed in the impossible mission of processing what’s going on around them.
A final word: special credit goes to actress Hannah Waddingham, playing Rear Admiral Neely. This weekend, she marks an impressive feat: as an ensemble member in both Mission: Impossible 8 and Lilo & Stitch (also opening today), she joins a small group of performers in the cast of two movies planning to debut at #1 and #2 of the box office in the same weekend.
