Emilia Pèrez is the Most Absurd Film You Will See in the Cinema This Year!
Emilia Pèrez, winner of 4 Golden Globes and already conquering the 2025 Oscars, has been in theaters. At Cannes 2024 he had made himself talk about for his audacity, his courage, his absurd and unclassifiable staging; a cinematographic experiment which, on the occasion of the French film event, brought home important prizes: that of the jury and the ex-aequo recognition to the four female protagonists. Then, the wagons of applications arrived, not least the 10 obtained at the latest Golden Globe 2025, of which he won 4. We are talking about Emilia Pèrez, an atypical musical written and directed by Jacques Audiard which finally arrived in.
A unique film of its kind, difficult to pigeonhole, which presents itself to the unsuspecting spectator in the room as an irresistible and unprecedented mélange between classical musical genre, Latin American melodrama, and pure and hard gangster movie. The new feature film by the French filmmaker is all this together and much, much more. Below we explain some of the reasons why Emilia Pèrez is probably one of the most absurd films that you will see in the cinema during this 2025 that has just begun. Zoe Saldaña plays Rita, a tenacious lawyer from Mexico City who is frighteningly contacted by the head of an important drug cartel. The fearsome character has observed Rita’s work from afar and thinks that she may be the right woman for a very delicate assignment: to find the best and most discreet doctors to perform such a reassignment intervention on this crime boss.
What is Emilia Pèrez Talking About?
Rita (Zoe Saldana), a practitioner from a law firm in Mexico City, is dissatisfied with the poor recognition she receives from her boss. One day, his services are requested by nothing less than the most feared drug cartel boss, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofìa Gascòn). Titubante, in the end, Rita decides to accept her invitation, driven by the desire for revenge, but she cannot imagine what awaits her: the boss asks her to help him stage his own death and then to provide him with one of the best reassignment surgeries of the sex that makes him the woman he always wanted to be, the beautiful Emilia Pérez. The situation is further complicated when Emilia, realizing that she cannot live without her family, involves Rita in a plan with which to embrace his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children without them ceasing to believe him dead: pretending to be a wealthy relative of Manitas and inviting them to live at his house. In the meantime, however, Jessi is planning to flee with his suitor Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez), who has spotted Emilia’s money in this regard.
But did you know that Emilia Pèrez was initially conceived as a libretto for a revolutionary and innovative opera? Jacques Audiard himself revealed it, but after setting aside the purely theatrical idea, he decided to bring his bet behind the camera on the big screen. Audiard thus rewrites the theatrical libretto and transforms it into a cinematographic script, then becomes the author of the lyrics of the songs of the film relying on the musical composition of Clément Ducol in the instrumental part and on the talent of the singer-songwriter Camille in the part of the singing interpretations. The result? One of the most radical works of the French film master and a political and artistic act of rare efficacy and originality.
A Transition Film!
Moreover, much of Emilia Pèrez‘s strength lies in her idea of conception, both of content and form. Indeed, perhaps the winning film of 4 Golden Globes is a wonderful example of how sometimes the shape and style, the language behind and in front of the camera, can not only go hand in hand with the content, but all in all represent the content itself, the final and intrinsic message of the work. Emilia Pèrez is in all respects a transition and transition film; whether it is the bodily one faced by the Mexican drug trafficking boss Manitas Del Monte or that of the cinematographic genres that pay homage and lives, the award-winning feature film is a big screen experience that is difficult to forget, because it is expertly capable of changing skin on the surface and at the same time in-depth, as does the extraordinary protagonist of the film played by the Spanish Karla Sofìa Gascòn, perhaps the first transgender actress to be able to obtain a nomination for the women’s Oscar.
Thus, in the very idea of biological gender and cinematographic and narrative genre, Emilia Pèrez is beautiful and basked, making the absurd and idiosyncratic mèlange of tones and contents that brings her most prodigious strength to the big screen, his most congenial weapon. How to describe Jacques Audiard’s new film? It is simply impossible to label it, give it definitions, and establish its boundaries that can even remotely embrace or caress the classic rigidity of the founding genres of the great cinema of yesterday and today.
By Changing Bodies, Society Changes?
A rigid and dusty division that the French director and screenwriter categorically rejects, making a film-manifesto set in Mexico behind the camera (but cast and crew never set foot in Latin American territory to shoot the film, choosing outsiders and theaters pose based in Paris) but with a deeply European heart. A socio-cultural contrast that has made the purists and many of the spectators of the nation of Central America turn up, outraged by the choice of the French filmmaker to want to tell (let it be clear, in his way), one of the blackest pages of Mexico’s history through the redemptive figure of a ruthless drug trafficking boss who decides to change his skin, sex and identity to reverse the course of his wrongdoings of the past and give a future of light and hope to a whole nation in mourning.
After all, one of the most powerful verses of the film’s soundtrack reads literally like this: “Changing the body changes society, changing society changes the soul, changing the soul changes society, and changing society finally changes everything”. The stubborn lawyer Rita Mora (an extraordinary Zoe Saldana in the smell of an immediate Oscar winner) says this in front of an internationally renowned medical student when she tries to convince him to approve the procedures for the delicate surgical operation that will transform the bloodthirsty Juan “Manitas” Del Monte in the caring and determined Emilia Pèrez.
By Changing Society, Everything Changes!
Give Emilia Pèrez a chance. The film written and directed by Jacques Audiard, despite his stubbornness and his brazenness in wanting to deal with social issues of undoubted delicacy, takes the risk of being able to do it with a very wide range of registers and cinematographic languages very distant and irreconcilable from the others. Instead, the author of pearls of French cinema such as A Taste of Rust and Bones and A Prophet, decides to shoot the cards and demonstrate to the seventh contemporary art how much a “third way” narrative is possible, which incorporates and celebrates genres and different contents within the same, precious audiovisual frame.
A work of artistic and political courage that, despite having divided the minds and opinions of the public and part of the American critics, will only continue to resonate in the hearts, minds, and ears of all the cinespettatori who from Thursday 9 January will choose to fill our cinemas to attend a big screen experiment that, to date, has very few equals. Ultimately, Emilia Pèrez is a disheartening and unlabeled experience, fluid and borderless, where security and clichés of contemporary society happily decay in favor of an unparalleled alternative artistic vision. He will stock up on nominations for the 2025 Oscars, most likely.
