Emilia Pérez (2024) This year’s Oscar favourite is a wild and beautiful ride
“How long will I lick their boots?”
So what do you get if you combine a frustrated yet ambitious Mexico City lawyer with a soothsaying, quietly spoken yet heavily masculine drug cartel boss seeking a gender affirming sex change and away from the “beast” he’s become? With unlimited funds and a whirlwind world wide search for a surgeon who’s prepared to undertake the surgery expressly ensuring the anonymity of her client, we now have a fabulously wealthy lawyer now somewhat leading her “calling” in life whilst seemingly at the beck and call of a now transformed and beautiful woman living the life she always dreamed of whilst shrouded in affairs of love and lust all around them amid matters of a social heart and responsibility for the Mexican streets that spawned them both and all shot through the prism of a musical crime drama as each and every one of the characters of our play sing and dance through their respective lives whether in Bangkok or Tel Aviv, London or Mexico City? Thus is Emilia Pérez and 13 Oscar nominations at this year’s Academy Awards and this English gentleman turned off the lights last evening and without knowing a single thing about this movie ahead of time made a few notes in the dark and smiled royally throughout for a wild and often beautiful ride.
Following a raft of production credits through the opening titles that truly demonstrates the reach of this ostensibly French yet international film, we slowly dissolve into a singing mariachi band wearing illuminated sombreros and then an overhead shot of Mexico City at night during the first song of the film of selling mattresses, refrigerators and a multitude of other household appliances which quickly continues through a close-up of a loudspeaker next seen in its truest context on top of a white van driving through the night time streets of Mexico City. As these strange mix of images are captured we cut to “Rita Castro” (Zoë Saldaña) watching from her apartment and as a quick cut to the wall behind her confirms she’s a “Counsellor of Law” and reciting, quietly reading aloud and preparing, for the first time of many in the coming frames of the film, the opening statement for her current court case. Framed immediately from behind we find Rita sitting at her desk as quick cuts now demonstrate bloodied crime scene photos connected to her current case as her mobile telephone rings. The caller confirms a key witness now refuses to testify and they have to push for a verdict of suicide and upon ending the call a frustrated Rita narrates her thoughts: “This prick kills his wife and we call it suicide”.
Now seen walking slowly through a supermarket, Rita continues to quietly recite aloud her opening statement and a “case of violence” and as she both leaves the supermarket and continues reciting her opening statement we see a large chanting crowd inching slowly towards her as to her left a smaller crowd of football fans celebrate a goal on a big screen in a street side bar. Now repeating a chant of “Rising and Falling” we cut first back to Rita typing her opening statement on her laptop in her apartment to the chanting crowd now all around her and joining her in song “about love, and death” and “about a suffering country”. A man is stabbed in the street nearby but the camera cuts back immediately to Rita singing and reciting her opening statement once more as the crowd all around her echo her every singing word. Now we find Rita once more typing her opening statement on her laptop but not in her apartment as before but in the middle of the street and a street she now walks through, from a small Chinese restaurant and through and between market stalls, reciting her opening statement as she goes and “This is not a fairy tale. This is a love story”. Still singing, Rita is now joined by the entirety of the crowded street in both a frenetic dance and song and “beheaded bimbos” before we cut again to Rita typing her opening statement sat at a desk in the street and next dancing and singing once more of “triumph over love” and of the defeat of “bad faith”. Sitting once more at a desk in the street she continues typing her opening statement with more dancing and singing all around her and as Rita’s own “misery” is writ large on her face, we cut to her finished opening statement rolling from a printer in her apartment.
We cut to Rita reading and reciting her opening statement of a “big hearted man” who is being “hounded by the media” for a final time whilst drinking coffee at a street vendor before realising she’s late, hurrying to the Court House. Now Rita is seen seated mouthing her opening statement as a male colleague (presumably the caller to her mobile telephone of earlier) performs it aloud for the Courtroom jury. As he stumbles over her words, Rita narrates “that idiot forgets everything” before looking at the defendant to her left and, narrating once more, “he looks like such a criminal”. With Rita looking downcast we cut immediately to a joyous post verdict Press Conference and now Rita among a large crowd taking a telephone call from her mother. Yes we won she confirms but “I feel like I ate shit” and after ending the call she asks a friend in the crowd for a tampon before ducking under and through a Press Conference she should be front and centre of and into a Court Room toilet. Her phone rings once more and after addressing the caller as her mother, she’s shocked to hear a male voice pose two questions and three statements before quickly hanging up “Why are you in the bathroom? You are the one deserving of the applause. Do you want to be rich? I have a proposition for you. Be at the news stand in 10 minutes”. Befuddled at the call, Rita begins quietly singing again as she looks at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, repeating the rhetorical questions “How Much Longer?” and “How long will I lick their boots?” before frustrated lyrics of “me and my fucking law degree” and of wasting her talent. Exiting the toilet still singing, but now at a louder volume, an array of cleaning staff join in behind her, repeating her lament of a “stone cold heart”, “my fat ass”, “no time to make babies” and even her skin colour before repeated song lyrics and continued questions of why did this stranger call me, why the news stand and again, “How Much Longer?”. Still singing and now repeating over and over again she has “nothing to lose” and “everything to gain”, we quickly find Rita standing nervously on the corner of the street beside a news stand covered in gruesome newspaper reports of murders in Mexico and as a car pulls up outside the news stand, a hood is placed over her head, and Rita is bundled into the car…
So there you have the opening 13 minutes of Emilia Pérez, this year’s most nominated Oscar film and against the grain of my usual film reviews I’ll leave any further character detail absent and leave you to track down a copy and enjoy the two hours that follow on from here. I am very far from the target audience of this film but I LOVED it.
Highly recommended.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
Whilst you’re here I may as well brag about the release of my trilogy of recently self-published books. Beautiful covers eh! As the title(s) would suggest, this is my life at the movies or at least from 1980 to 2024, and in volume 1 you’ll find 80 spoiler free appraisals of movies from debut filmmakers, 91 of the very best films appraised with love and absent of spoilers from 1990–2024 in volume 2, and in volume 3 you’ll find career “specials” on Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino together with the very best of the rest and another 87 spoiler free film reviews from 2001–2024.
All available in hardback and paperback and here are some handy links:
"A Life at the Movies Vol.1" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.2" - link to Amazon
"A Life at the Movies Vol.3" - link to Amazon