Sunday, November 24, 2024

Emilia Perez

 Jacques Audiard's Emilia Perez (2024) epitomizes baroque filmmaking.  There has been sea-change during my lifetime from the didactic, argumentative films and TV that predominated in the fifties and sixties and the current sensibility emerging after the year 2000 and, now, it seems, prevalent.  When I was young, television was designed for public edification and, even at its most lurid, preached certain core values of honesty, courage, and steadfastness -- heroes didn't desert their friends and families and they struggled to overcome hardship; even anti-heroes subscribed to certain well-understood codes, although more in the breach than the observance.  Films and TV adapted theater-works of the preceding generation and these shows were oriented around well-defined problems and constructed as forensic debates -- the better side of moral and ethical arguments generally prevailed.  I must confess to feeling (as a youth) a certain discomfort with these didactic works of theater and film; good taste reigned and these shows operated within tight constraints as to what could be shown ot intimated.  Science fiction or fantasy was, generally, frowned-upon as evidencing an unseemly flight away from reality and the important social problems that cinema and plays addressed.  Strictures of realism governed representation.  Nothing could be so lurid or outrageous as to distract from the fundamental teaching premise of these shows.  Every episode of Andy Griffith or, for that matter, The Twilight Zone taught a lesson that could be applied broadly to social and cultural problems.  We are now in the midst of a resurgence of the Baroque.  The more garish and improbable the narrative, the better.  In the classical art of the fifties and sixties, and to some extent after that era, genre distinctions were strictly observed.  A film like Emilia Perez, a mash-up of opera, horror, gangster movies and the sort of melodrama exemplified by Mexican telenovelas would be unthinkable.  (The film is kin to certain works by Pedro Almodovar, although more extreme in its imagery.)  Baroque narrative involves fantastical displays of tyranny, sadism, and passion; characters conceal their true identities and gender is completely fluid -- women will be men and men will be women.  Family relations are obscured resulting in strange tensions and sudden, ghastly revelations.  Characters are prey to the most extravagant desires and obsessions. In Emilia Perez, a cartel leader, Manitas is posited to be like Nero or Caligula, a figure of unlimited power, demented obsessions, and cruelty -- in other words, a Baroque king ruling by some kind of inscrutable divine right. The unruly force of passion banishes the spoken word -- characters communicate their desires and fears by singing at one another.  The pictures advancing the story have the burnished, deep hues -- that is, the high def dimensions -- of a canvas by Caravaggio:  wildly gesticulating and figures grimace at us out of a deep darkness.  The camera renders its subjects as sculptural, hewn from the blackness and defined by the sinewy shadow.  Everything tends toward the turbulent expressionist contortions of a sculptor like Bernini.

A successful female lawyer, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana) is professionally thwarted by her boss.  She's dissatisfied and the boss takes credit for her brilliance.  But Manitas, a drug cartel leader, at the height of his powers takes notice of Rita.  He has her kidnapped and brought to his hide-out in the desert (it looks like a quarry or gravel pit) where the drug lord occupies some sort of towering semi-tractor-trailer, a dark cavern full of video screens broadcasting the environs thronged with gun-toting thugs.  The drug lord, who exemplifies Mexican machismo, at its most extreme suffers from severe gender dysmorphia.  He longs to  become a woman.  His wealth is sufficient for him to put Rita on retainer and fly her around the world to seek a surgeon willing to convert the drug lord into a woman.  Rita goes to Thailand and, then, Tel Aviv where she finds a doctor who she persuades to fly to Mexico to perform the surgery.  On the eve of the operation, Manitas bids farewell to his much beloved two children and his wife, played by Selena Gomez.  He sends his family to Lausanne, Switzerland under falsified passports.  Then, he goes under the knife, awaking after intricate surgery as a woman, the eponymous Emilia Perez.  The lawyer is paid a fortune and becomes a wealthy woman; we see that the mobster has given her an "Infinity" VISA card.  

Some years pass.  At a dinner party in London, Rita meets a big, buxom woman whom she gradually recognizes to be Manitas in his female incarnation.  Emilia Perez says that he can't live without his children and commissions the lawyer to bring them back to Mexico City with their mother.  (Manitas faked his death by fire to the horror of wife and children who, of course, are not aware that the drug lord has survived as woman.)  Rita arranges for the children and Manitas' wife to stay at the elaborate mansion of Emilia Perez, a structure overhanging the vast amphitheater of Mexico City.  The wife doesn't recognize her husband in the guise of Emilia and is encouraged to share intimate memories of her marriage to the drug lord with the woman (who pretends to be Manitas's sister -- that is, Aunt Emilia).  One of the children, the little boy remarks that Emilia smells like his papa.  Freed from the obligations of his drug cartel, Manitas as Emilia founds a non-governmental organization dedicated to finding and identifying the bodies of people "disappeared" during the fighting between rival gangs.  This organization is called Lucecitas.  Emilia runs the organization from an office in Mexico City and serves hundreds of grieving widows and families whose children were murdered in the drug wars -- she sits at a desk in a room decorated with a huge painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe.  Emilia embarks on a lesbian love affair with one of the women whose son vanished in the fighting between the adversary gangs.  At the same time, Manitas' wife embarks on a love affair with a man wearing a black cowboy hat, a fellow who turns out to be a Narco himself.  (Emilia persuades his/her wife to confess that she began her affair with this rival Narco when she was married to Manitas.)  The wife elopes with her boyfriend, taking the two children with her to the dismay and rage of Emilia Perez.  Emilia vows revenge but is kidnapped by the Narco and has three of his fingers lopped off to establish the bona fides of the kidnappers -- the Narco demands 30 million dollars.  Rita Castro, the lawyer, recruits nine men with machine guns and they drive out into the desert to confront the Narco and Manitas's former wife.  This sets up the violent climax of the film.  At the end of the movie, Emilia has become revered as a kind of Saint.  A life-size image of her is carried in a parade in front of a Mexican marching band.  The image is placed on a hillside overlooking the megalopolis of Mexico City, a sort of holy figure perched above the ramshackle barrios on the edge of the city.  

The story eschews ordinary expository dialogue.  The action is propelled by elaborate and operatic song-and-dance numbers.  Patients in the throes of sex change surgery are rolled around in Busby Berkeley-style wheel-chair and surgical gurney ballets.  One of Manitas' sons sings a little aria about how Emilia smells like her papa.  There are love duets between Emilia and her girlfriend, Epifanio, the  abused wife of a "disappeared" Narco -- Epifanio is happy the man's bones have been found.  At dinner parties and fundraisers for Lucecitas, the people on-screen sing and dance.  The music is a combination of heart-felt pop tunes and Spanish rap songs.  It's surprisingly effective -- a bit on the order of the score to LaLa Land but with better melodies.  The fact that characters suddenly start singing in the most dire or passionate circumstances makes the picture unpredictable and engenders instability in the imagery.  Remarkably, it all works pretty well -- the songs are well-integrated into the action and the story moves forward briskly.  The emotional dilemmas experienced by the characters are plausible and moving.  In my estimation the movie is very good, much better than one would expect from a summary of its plot.  (Apparently, my enthusiasm for the picture was shared by the Judges at Cannes where the film won some major awards.)  It's all quite spectacular -- the photography is very handsome, often stylized, and there are some breathtaking shots; near the end, the Narco flees a shootout with his moll, Selena Gomez sprawled across the seat and half outside of the car's window; she looks amber and gold, the figure of a martyr by Bernini and her shoulder is tinted red by the taillights of the speeding car illumining the clouds of dust through which they are driving.  In the shoot-out, the gunsmoke forms eddies and seems to flow in reverse back into the building shot to pieces by machine guns.  In Emilia Perez's mansion, "Aunt Emilia" amuses her children by having them play a video game involving skiing -- the kids miss skiing in the Swiss Alps.  When they are done playing, the camera picks out a couple of maids in the house who are trying out the exotic game for themselves.

In general terms, Emilia Perez is not too different from a film noir of the late forties or fifties.  There are sinister secrets and people conceal their true identities.  An argument could be made that the picture bears some resemblance to Jacques Tourneur's similarly Mannerist Out of the Past.  But the imagery is far more extreme, the song and dance numbers persuasive but, of course, utterly discordant with the narrative (which they paradoxically propel) and the final scenes in the film showing Emilia Perez deified, a sort of goddess hanging over the grim slums of Mexico City, are directly Baroque in character.  This movie is interesting and much better than my summary suggests and I recommend it.

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