EMILIA PEREZ*** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Day 6

EMILIA PEREZ is a deeply odd and sporadically successful film from French auteur Jacques Audiard (A PROPHET, DHEEPAN).  It comes to London having won the coveted Cannes Jury Prize and features a story and characters rarely centred on screen.  Some of the musical numbers are stunning. But I found myself over-stuffed, confused and adrift.

Despite the film's name, the protagonist is actually a lawyer called Rita played superbly by Zoe Saldana (GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY).  When we meet her she is a poor but smart lawyer frustrated at the lack of opportunities her skin colour condemns her to.  The opening numbers as she writes a speech in a food market, and then discusses her options with some cleaners, are brilliantly rendered with powerful dynamic choreography. 

Rita's life is changed when a drug lord called Manitas (Karla Sofia Garcon) hires her to facilitate his gender reassignment surgery and to hide his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez - Only Murders In The Building) and their two young sons in Switzerland.  That should be the end of their relationship but four years later the now Emilia Perez asks Rita to facilitate her return to Mexico, and to also bring back her children and their mother who will live with their "Auntie".  

Once again, this should be the end of their relationship, but Emilia and Rita end up founding a charity to find the disappeared people of Mexico, victims of the drug war that Manitas was complicit in. Along the way, Emilia finds love with Epifania (Adriana Paz) and Jessi finds love with her ex-lover Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez).  It's only at this point that Emilia's control is upended and in fear of losing her children, Manitas' nasty language and manner break through Emilia's polished new persona. 

There's lots to love in this film. As I said the two opening numbers and Saldana's critique of Mexico's corrupt rich at a fund-raising gala are fantastic. It's rare and moving to see a trans story centred, and to see what Manitas has to sacrifice to live her authentic life.  We absolutely feel her pain at not being able to confess to being her son's father. I also admired the concise way in which the love story between Emilia and Epifania is told. Kudos to Karla Sofia Garcon for pulling of a layered and complex role. 

But there's a lot to criticise too.  First, Rita is a cipher not a protagonist.  After the prologue we never really understand her motives or see any kind of life outside of Emilia. She is just an observer.  I needed more time with her, or to see more layers to her in the contemporary storyline. The same goes for Jessi who is just a ditzy superficial floozy until basically the final five minutes of the film. What a waste of Selena Gomez' talent? And Epifania is similarly shortchanged. It's like a weird trans version of the Bechdel problem. In the most uncharitable reading, who are these women outside of Emilia except for people who she manipulates into satisfying her desires?

Finally, some plot holes. If it's so secret and dangerous that Manitas is having gender reassignment surgery, why does Rita fly the Israeli doctor over to Mexico?  And if Manitas' little boy realises Emilia smells like Papa, then why doesn't Jessi?  I know that in some ways she just think Emilia looks like her cousin Manitas but it's clear Emilia is a trans woman. Can she not figure it out? That she doesn't makes her character even more stupid and frankly unbelievable.

EMILIA PEREZ has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated R. It played Cannes where it won the Jury prize and the ensemble female cast won Best Actress. It will be released in the USA on November 1st in cinemas and then on November 13th on Netflix.

CORSAGE - BFI London Film Festival 2022 - Day 3

CORSAGE is a stunning piece of imaginative film-making from writer-director Marie Kreutzer, featuring a memorable performance from Vicky Krieps (THE PHANTOM THREAD) as the iconic Austro-Hungarian Empress Sisi.

Kreutzer's approach is to take a bold ahistorical approach to get to the emotional truth of an incredibly famous, beautiful woman, trapped in a loveless marriage and burdened by the obligations of her public role.  It is similar in approach - though bolder in its leaps of imagination - than Sofia Coppola's MARIE ANTOINETTE - far more successful than Pablo Larrain's hysterical SPENCER, though less honest in its treatment of Sisi's eating disorder.  The key difference is that in both of those movies, the central women were depicted as passive victims, whereas Krieps' Sisi is the architect of her own liberation.

The movie opens with Sisi about to turn 40 in 1870s Vienna, the mother of a teenage Crown Prince and a precocious and dutiful daughter. She is obsessed with her weight, skin and youth, starving herself and riding, fencing and doing gym exercises to maintain her figure. She doesn't want to have sex with her husband, but is also jealous of a young girl that he flirts with. At first we think she is in love with her riding instructor but then realises she just gets off on him (and her husband) looking at her adoringly. As with Princess Diana, we get the impression that she is both trapped by society's superficial and unreal expectations of her, but that she has also internalised these misogynistic expectations of beauty and turned into a narcissist. Certaintly, her treatment of her confidante and lady in waiting speaks to her putting her own happiness before that of all others. 

The wonder of Krieps performance is that Sisi never seems passive or a victim even when she is: she's actually spiky, bitchy, rebellious and wild, to the point of neglecting her duties with her indulgent cousin Ludwig of Bavaria. She's also incredibly athletic and not lying when she says she's a better rider than her instructor. It helps that Kreutzer chooses not to show us the excesses of Sisi - her absurd hair and beauty regimen - her more waspish comments about fat people - her serial infidelities. This is a much less extreme and yet more extreme Sisi - less fat-shaming and more feminist -  one more palatable to contemporary tastes. 

As to the rest of the film I love that Kreutzer shows us people in full costume dress with retinues of obsequious servants but places them in derelict locations filled with anachronistic props. It sounds too on the nose, but it actually works really well to underpin how rotten the edifice of the central European monarchy was at that stage, and the sham of these great imperial monarchs with their rotten teeth and fake beards.  Kreutzer's Sisi just takes that fakery one step further. 

CORSAGE has a running time of 113 minutes. It played Cannes, where Vicky Krieps won an acting prize. It is playing in Official Competition at the BFI London Film Festival. It will be released in the USA on December 23rd and in the UK on December 24th.