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.

THE DEAD DON'T DIE

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is an unashamedly indulgent movie who's success relies on the audience wanting to be in on the joke.  I went along for the ride and found it to be uproariously funny, silly, shaggy and joyful - and hands down one of my favourite films of 2019.  This isn't a film for those over-obsessed with tight-plotting, consistent pace or an aversion to jump the shark moments. But as I said, if you go with the silliness, there's a lot of fun to be had.

The film opens in small town USA, reminiscent of original Twin Peaks. There are some slow-witted nice cops, played by Bull Murray, Adam Driver and Chloe Sevigny. And there's policing a dispute between Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) and MAGA-supporter Farmer Frank (Steve Buscemi).  There's pace is lackadaisical and their hearts decent.  It soon becomes apparent that polar fracking has caused the earth to move off its axis resulting in whacky daylight hours and a zombie apocalypse. The rest of the film sees how our heroes cope with the impending doom ("kill the head") - not to mention the newly arrived Scottish mortician with hardcore Samurai skills (Tilda Swinton). 

We get lots of references to George Romero, including an update on his consumerist satire, as zombies wonder round in desperate search of wifi.  We also get a hopeful message about how "the children are our future". But mostly this is a film of supreme visual comedy - a shot of Adam Driver pulling into a diner parkway in a tiny red convertible Smart car - a shot of Tilda Swinton applying 1980s New Romantic makeup to a corpse - or a re-animated Iggy Pop hunting for coffee.  

Any film is worth watching that gives us even one of those things. So yes, I get all the critics and I see the film's weaknesses but I just dont' care, because when it delivers it's absolutely hilarious!

THE DEAD DON'T DIE is rated R and has a running time of 104 minutes. The film played Cannes 2019 and was released in the USA in June. It opens in the UK on Friday.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is the delightful sequel to the charming 2012 kids animated movie.  It brings together most of the creative and voice team of the original for a story that feels organic in its progression.  In the first film, Dracula (Adam Sandler) struggled to accept that his beloved daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) had fallen in love with a human interloper (Andy Samberg) in his monster hotel.  In the sequel, the kids have gotten married and Drac is a grandpa to cute little Dennis. Problem is, Dennis doesn't appear to be a monster at all.  And so, a concerned Mavis wants to take him to live in the human world, much to Drac and his son-in-law's horror.

For much of the movie we see Drac take the kid on a road-trip to discover his inner monster, with laughably negligible impact. Turns out the monsters aren't really that monstrous anymore, partly through old age, and just plain old assimilation.  Pretty soon, Drac comes to believe that Mavis is right.  But at a last hurrah birthday party for Dennis, Drac's father Vlad (a brilliant cameo by Mel Brooks) comes to town. This infamously hard-ball monster is aghast that his son-in-law is human, just as the human grandparents are happy the kid is "normal".  

There's lots of social commentary in here about the difficulty of being accepted as a mixed-race or non-straight kid.  The difference between tolerating something and truly accepting it.  The difficulty of being understood by both sides and the pressure to please parents and grandparents.  And that's to be applauded. But aside from all that, the movie really works at the level of great animation, and superb imaginative comedy. The scenes of vampire bat flight are beautifully animated, and there are some lovely throw-away visual jokes (such as Drac giving the Invisible Man a purple nurple). Finally, what I love in this movie, as in the original, is its heart.  This is just a straightforwardly joyously warm-hearted movie that makes you want to hug your family and embrace glorious diversity.  Kudos to all involved.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 has a running time of 89 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie is on global release.

SPRING BREAKERS

Almost every review I read of SPRING BREAKERS after watching it described the movie as a kind of "fever dream" which is presumably lifted from a PR-prepared media packet and says more about the laziness of the mainstream critics than the film itself.  For me, the film was less a fever dream than an elaborate revenge fantasy with feminist overtones that belied its apparently sexploitation vibe.  The subversive message, and the careful balance between absurdist humour and the deeply sinister had me on the edge of my seat.  SPRING BREAKERS may, then, occasionally, be deliberately bad, but it's not a bad film, and every provocation it makes is deeply thought out and played out with utter conviction.

The movie is written and directed by Harmony Korine - the writer who worked with Larry Clark on the controversial but brilliant teen sex and AIDS drama, KIDS. He brings that same authenticity to SPRING BREAKERS, with its willingness to examine the allure, the stupidity and the decadence of teen culture all at once.  As the movie opens, we meet four teenage girls desperate to escape their banal lives and go on vacation to Florida.  Somewhat improbably, three of them decide to commit a robbery to fund their trip. It's not an immoral act so much as an amoral act - they seem to live in a world without consequences or impulses other than those originating in their own desires.  This behavior continues in Florida - they get drunk, get high, and it is only by a whisper's breath that they aren't raped.  To be sure, there's plenty of simulated exploitation in the way they're photographed by the over-riding message we're getting is not to be titillated but shocked at their stupidity and awed by their luck in not coming a cropper.

The exception is Selena Gomez' rather obviously named Faith, who is an evangelical Christian.  She goes along on the trip funded by crime, and is at first the most mesmerized by the promise of Spring Break - the idea of freedom away from home.  But, tellingly, she's also the first to see the danger inherent in the girls' open-ness.  What I love about Korine's treatment of this character is that in the context of the MTV does Cancun shooting style of the film - all lurid color  thumping soundtrack, close ups of girls getting pissed and showing their tits - it would have been easy to mock Faith's naivety and, well, faith. This is  in fact what we see the other girls do.  But in fact the movie has an unspoken respect for Faith, and she is allowed to escape with her morality and beliefs in tact.

The remaining three girls continue to come off as frighteningly stupid and ripe for exploitation as they take up with James Franco's rapper, Alien aka Al.  This may well be Franco's greatest performance - combining as it does some really sinister movements with laugh out loud humor.  When Alien tries to groom Faith, persuading her to stay, he comes off as a deeply sly and manipulative character dripping with hatred of the white trash teens.  Then again, as we get to see him more, we realise that he's in fact far more naive and ripe for exploitation than the girls. In fact, he's a rather pathetic figure.  Franco also has the best lines of the movie, as he articulates his value-structure in terms of the American Dream. It's a speech so funny, so pathetic, so damning of American consumerist culture that it's worth repeating:

"This is the fuckin' American dream. This is my fuckin' dream, y'all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got... I got SHORTS! Every fuckin' color. I got designer T-shirts! I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin' VAM-pires. I got Scarface. On repeat. SCARFACE ON REPEAT. Constant, y'all! I got Escape! Calvin Klein Escape! Mix it up with Calvin Klein Be. Smell nice? I SMELL NICE!"

In that speech we see that Alien is as bound up in a fantasy as Faith is. She wants to escape her banal life by coming on Spring Break and staying there forever, and Alien has apparently succeeded in just that mission.  It's so absolutely right that he would compare himself to Al Pacino in Scarface, although he's blind to the true meaning of that story. And how subversive and glorious to cast pretty teen cover boy Franco as the metal-mouthed rapper, aspiring to the perfume ad perfection that Franco, in real life, did so much to perpetuate.  

As the film moves into its second act, we see Alien and the three remaining girls go on a spree of robberies, which are evidently idiotic insofar as they incite the wrath of a competing drug gang.   While the girls appear to think they're in a rap video, come first-person shooter, Rachel Corine's Cotty soon learns different and she too departs.  As much as I loved that Faith was allowed to leave, I was equivocal about the message Harmony Korine was giving in allowing Cotty to escape relatively unharmed, both in this later pivotal scene, and in an earlier Girls Gone Wild moment that could so easily have ended in rape. This is the only small criticism I would make of the film.

Faith, Cotty and Alien are clearly delineated because, for all their delusions, they are deeply human. They care.  They love. They are scared. By contrast, Vanessa Hudgens' Candy and Ashley Benson's Brit are so interchangeable that it's barely worth learning their names.  But they are memorable because unlike Cotty and Faith and Alien they are utterly without morality, utterly without regret or fear or love or delusion.  They are what they are - natural born killers.  They don't go to Florida to escape themselves, but to become more fully what they always were: first-person shooters who are more than aware of the stereotypes their gender and dress give off, and more than happy to humiliate any man who seeks to exploit them as a result.  Their proto-feminist revenge is a fantasy - by this point the film has let go of any anchor it might have once had to reality, but it is deeply emotionally satisfying and cathartic, at the same time as being horrifying. After all that gyrating and objectifying it is the girls who are objectifying the men, and not as sex objects but as targets in a video game.  

I loved this film. I loved the intelligence with which it mimicked an exploitation genre but subverted it.  I loved the day-glo cinematography and the use of voiceover with its lullaby repetition - similar to Malick.  I loved the uncomfortable mix of menace and pathos and dark humor - the sharp turns that catch you unaware and the moments of intimacy and authenticity.  This is a memorable film and a powerful film and deserves to be seen.

SPRING BREAKERS played Venice and Toronto 2012 and was released earlier this year in France, Italy, Denmark, Spain, the USA, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, Bulgaria, Estonia and Canada. It i s currently on release in the UK, Ireland, Poland, Romania, the Netherlands and Norway. It opens on April 26th in Lithuania, May 2nd in Portugal, Singapore and Mexico, on May 9th in Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and Russia and on June 15th in Japan. 

SPRING BREAKERS has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is, like PARANORMAN, an absolutely lovely, beautifully drawn, heart-warming children's animation film that pays homage to horror film history.  Adam Sandler plays Count Dracula, so scarred my the peasant mob killing his beloved wife, that he turns his castle into a hotel for ghouls and monsters to protect them from the nasty humans in the outside world. His extreme protection irks his teenage daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and when she meets a stray backpacker called Jonathan (Andy Samberg) the Count is torn between protecting his daughter from the outside world, and protecting the backpacker from the monsters at the hotel.  So ensues some wonderful comedy, with the Count loosening up under Jonathan's influence, and Mavis tentatively entering her first romance.  Ultimately, the movie plays a request for tolerance but it moves us because of its loving rendering of a father-daughter relationship.  As an out and out daddy's girl myself, I fell in love with it.  Kudos to director Genndy Tartakovsky (DEXTER'S LABORATORY) for his gonzo animation style, raucous sense of humour and genuine heart.  This is simply an adorable film.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA played Toronto 2012 and is on release in Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, the USA, Japan, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ireland and the UK. It opens on October 18th in the Czech Republic, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania and Sweden; on October 25th in Germany, Kuwait, Ukraine and Spain; on November 2nd in Iceland; on November 8th in Denmark, Italy and Poland; on November 19th in Vietnam; on November 23rd in Finland, Indonesia, Macedonia and Turkey; on December 5th in Thailand, Greece, Singapore and India; on December 19th in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal; on  January 7th in Hong Kong and Taiwan and on February 13th in France. 

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated PG in the USA.