Jean-Luc Godard is often credited for saying that all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun. But Emilia Pérez proves that some musical numbers help too.
The audacious new operetta by Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone; Paris, 13th District) explores through song the consequences of violence and the corrosive, corrupting power of the criminal underworld. The film, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes and scored a shared Best Actress win for Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz, follows lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Saldaña) as she accepts an offer she can’t refuse. A notorious druglord (Gascón) asks Rita to facilitate her gender affirmation surgery so that she may escape the drug trade and live authentically as a woman. It’s not an easy prospect, but a golden ticket out for Rita after a career defending other murderers.
The role makes Saldaña a favourite this awards season as oddsmakers currently peg her the frontrunner for Best Supporting Actress, with Gascón poised to make history as the first openly transgender actor to be nominated for (and possibly win) an acting Oscar. (“Openly” because Elliot Page was nominated for Juno before coming out.) It’s an overdue moment for both stars with the performances among the many reasons that make Emilia Pérez one of the must-see films of the season, if one of the more divisive ones.
For Saldaña, Rita lets her revisit the stellar moves with which she gained notice in the 2000 dance film Center Stage. “Emilia Pérez gave me an opportunity to reconnect with parts of me that I had forever sort of said goodbye to, and yet found myself in the last years of my life yearning to have just an ounce of what that felt like,” says Saldaña, speaking with media during a recent virtual event. There’s a great parallel between the star and her character as Rita recognizes that Emilia’s offer to cross a line means an opportunity for a new life that simply isn’t available to her.
The role, which requires the film’s most complicated song and dance numbers as well as the strongest emotional arc, lets the 46-year-old Saldaña prove why she’s one of Hollywood unsung stars. Saldaña is among the most bankable talents in Hollywood, with $14 billion in box office revenue for films bearing her name, but she’s generally not cited on rosters of cinema’s top stars, if in part because she’s usually hidden under layers of make-up or CGI. She’s also the only actor to have four films cross the $2 billion mark—Avatar and its sequel, plus Avengers: Endgame and Avengers: Infinity War. (Her three Guardians of the Galaxy movies didn’t crack the billion dollar mark individually, but grossed $2.485 billion combined.) She’s a favourite among genre fans, but audiences outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe are in for a surprise.
Saldaña is proud of her sci-fi success, but admits that she embraced the chance to challenge herself after carving a space for herself in action roles. “When you’re young, you’re fearless, and little did you know that when your folks are keeping you busy and they’re putting you in dance, and in art, and in tennis—if you’re lucky enough to have families that can afford that and do that—most of the times, you’re able to use these skills for something else in your life,” she says. “It catapulted me into a career where there was an abundance of roles when it came to active women in action and science fiction. I have an affinity for that, but I am a native New Yorker, so I have jazz hands in my DNA.”
The jazzy DNA is evident in Saldaña’s performance. Her energy rubs off on co-stars. “I felt Zoe was more daring than any singer, was very open and full of proposals,” says composer/songwriter Camille, who did the music with Clément Ducol. “I remember [her] in post-synchronization giving even more breath, even more life to the scenes.”
Camille cites Saldaña’s big number “El Mal” as an example where the actor’s intuition explored elements of musicality and delivery. The song sees Rita tour the tables at a gala benefit for Emilia Pérez’s foundation to support families who’ve lost loved ones to the violence of the drug trade—a form of atonement for her past life. But Emilia falls back on old contacts to fund her NGO with dirty money. Rita isn’t comfortable with the hypocrisy that Emilia asks her to facilitate and she performs a jazzy number as she dances around and atop tables, telling folks to pay up to safeguard their secrets.
“It felt like a form of gossip, like I was letting you guys [the audience] in on gossip, so in the choreography with Damien Jalet, I was very obviously pointing at [a criminal],” says Saldaña.
“El Mal” marks one scene in the film where Emilia and Rita perform a kind of call and response as the song embodies a tango between the contractions that Emilia has employed Rita to help untangle. While Saldaña gets the showier moves, Gascón stays fixed within the spotlight as Emilia commands the room from the podium. Her movements need to be very reserved lest she betray herself to people she knew in her past life. The restraint also reflects Emilia’s eternalised machismo as elements of her past life infrequently rise to the surface.
“There’s a scene that was cut from the screenplay, and in this scene, Rita and Emilia were watching Epifania dance,” explains Gascón, speaking through an interpreter and referring to the lover that Emilia finds through her foundation. “Emilia was not dancing. She was talking to Rita and she says, ‘A tough guy only dances twice in his life: the day of his wedding and the day of his daughter’s wedding.” Gascón notes that the scene was cut amid the script’s extensive workshopping with Audiard, but says she found inspiration in the invocation of The Godfather and obviously Norman Mailer’s book Tough Guys Don’t Dance in which a former drug-runner wrestles with his sexuality, much like Emilia refrains from dancing. Other script changes include casting actors who were 10 to 20 years older than Audiard wrote them, as Saldaña and Gascón said their characters needed to reflect years of lived experience.
Gascón, who acknowledged to participants in the conference that she was feeling a little off after staying up until 3:00 AM the night before reading the comments on an interview, says she feels that Emilia Pérez has an important humanist message to combat the negativity that transpeople face daily. But she adds that there was a creative negotiation while making the film. “It was really [about] building both Manitas and Emilia,” she says, referring to her character’s names pre-and-post transition, “and what we needed to discover is which Manitas and which Emilia we wanted to bring about to the audience.”
Part of that process, moreover, is Gascón’s decision to play both parts herself, a brave creative coup that requires her to juggle different emotional and vocal registers. “It took a lot of discussions, and the first one and the most important for me with the director was, what was the reason for Emilia wanting this transformation? Was it because she wanted to run away from justice? Or was it because it was her truth? That really changed the meaning of the film, because it would have been just a superficial comedy. For me, it was very important to know that. And, I think, in the end, the best decision was made.”
The actress brings a laissez faire attitude about her own dancing chops and credits the choreographers for pushing her through the moves to create both characters. “We started to work with the physicality and I had to learn so much from everybody. Camille and Clement really tried to teach me about music and dance,” says Gascón. “I’m a bit rough around the edges about that type of stuff. The man really tried to make me dance, but really, I dance like Robocop. But what that did was help build the character and helped build the worlds of Emilia and Manitas, this terrifying character. But at the bottom, it’s somebody who’s yearning and trying to be themselves and get out of that world of darkness.”
“The work with Karla Sofía has been very thrilling because it’s really a singer’s work to go from a low husky voice to Emilia’s voice. Every singer, every actress, I guess, would dream to do that role, but every singer wishes to explore those two sides,” adds Camille. “So we really worked on differentiating both voices. For Emilia, we went towards something more intimate, something like her inside voice, rather than a diva. We thought Emilia would be a diva, but actually, she’s much more than that.” Emilia generally sings ballads, exploring new emotional territory with her children and Epifania, trying out a little tenderness in her new life.
For Gomez, who surprises as the druglord’s wife, Emilia Pérez offers an unvarnished spin on her popstar roots. “I appreciated that Jacques didn’t want to necessarily use any auto-tune. He wanted to record us every time we did the number,” she says. “Ultimately, he used a lot of those vocals in the movie. I thought it was really raw. And I appreciated that it didn’t sound perfect.”
“It had been over 20 years since I walked into a dance studio. I adapted my brain to understand and feed information to my muscles. It’s a very technical thing,” agrees Saldaña, echoing that the rawness of the vocals and the dancing lets them create authentic characters.
“Playing a character like Rita, she lives a lot on the inside. This is a woman that does not have the courage or the strength to speak up and be her own advocate. She can be an advocate for others, but she can’t speak for herself,” adds Saldaña. “That was a very familiar woman in my eyes: a woman that was desperate for change and visibility at all costs. I just wanted to know what it was like to be in her skin.”
Emilia Pérez is now playing in theatres.
It streams on Netflix beginning Nov. 13.
