Can people really change? Under its many layers — musical, crime drama, trans self-actualization story — that’s the simple question at the heart of Emilia Pérez.
For Karla Sofia Gascón, who stars in the title role, that meant embodying a radical transformation — leaving behind her life as a cruel cartel chief, and emerging as Emilia Pérez, her true, most authentic self.
Emilia isn’t the only character in the film who wants to change her life. Enter Rita, played by Zoe Saldaña. “Rita is an accomplished lawyer who lives in Mexico City and is at a point in her life where she wants more than what her job and her environment can offer,” Saldaña told Netflix. Disgusted by the cartels and their hold over Mexican life, Rita nevertheless helps Manitas transition and hides her family away in Switzerland; then she takes her payout and hits the road. But they both have unfinished business. Soon enough, Emilia asks Rita to carry out another task for her: to bring Emilia’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and her children back to Mexico.
The stage is set for a musical melodrama. Emilia aims to make amends for the crimes she committed as a cartel kingpin, but finds that, in her life, things are hardly that simple. As she juggles her relationship with her family and a new connection to widow Epifanía (Adriana Paz), all four women’s lives intersect and expand.
“Emilia Pérez doesn’t just tell the story of one woman. It’s about four very different women,” writer-director Jacques Audiard told Netflix. “I had to be able to lend these characters a past, a history, a real maturity. I realized this when I discovered Zoe and Karla almost simultaneously. In a way, they reoriented the script, making it denser. Their own lives fed into the lives of the characters.”
Read on to learn more about how those lives begin — and end.
Yes. With the help of prosthetic makeup, Gascón played both Emilia and her pre-transition self. “I like to play characters who are as far away from me as possible — and Manitas has nothing to do with me,” Gascón said. “But naturally, things echoed in me, particularly Manitas’ profound desire for change.” Gascón also enjoyed the relative freedom that the makeup provided. “During production, portraying Emilia was much more challenging,” she said. “I had to wear a corset that restricted my movements, a wig that held my head tightly, and high heels. With Manitas, after being made up and having prosthetics applied on my face, I was free to move as I wished.”
French singer Camille, who wrote the lyrics to the original songs in the film, told Netflix, “I wanted to break the genre’s tropes, and Jacques and I were on the same page since, as a filmmaker, he was driven by the same desire.”
At once a gritty thriller and an operatic melodrama, the film transcends genre boundaries as its characters transcend their origins. Audiard originally conceived the film as a libretto. “During the first lockdown, I wrote a treatment quickly, and I realized along the way that it was closer to an opera libretto than to a film script,” Audiard said. “It was broken down into acts, there were few sets, and the characters were archetypal.”
Camille and Clément Ducol (Chicken for Linda!), who wrote the score, also had a hand in writing the film itself, in collaborative story sessions that would decide which sequences would be told via song. “We would meet in the morning, and it felt like I was attending master classes in screenwriting,” Ducol told Netflix. “As the songs were supposed to serve a narrative purpose, it was important for Camille and me to be there, including when they were in the process of building the storyline.”
Yes. For Saldaña, the film’s dance numbers were a welcome return to her roots. “I grew up on stage as a classical dancer,” she explained. “I’m from New York, so life in my head is a musical theater that never ends. I was grateful that I got to come back to that part of me, which I left behind when I started this wonderful career in film. The older I get, the more I realize I have been missing that part of my life.”
In song and dance numbers, Rita reveals her inner conscience and private feelings about the compromised legal system within which she’s forced to operate. In one of the film’s centerpiece musical numbers, Saldaña performs “El Mal,” a righteous earworm that sees Rita singing and dancing like nobody’s watching, because they aren’t — their eyes are trained on a presentation at a gala by Emilia. Preparing for the freewheeling choreography of this sequence was a welcome challenge for Saldaña.
“We started working on ‘El Mal’ in January, and it was one of the last scenes we shot in June,” Saldaña said. “Thankfully, we got to do a lot of rehearsal with our Steadicam operator, Sacha Naceri, because the scene was really a dance with him. It was fun, amazing, scary. And it hurt! I was icing my back, elbows, and neck for days afterward, but I did it! I love everything about that scene.”
When Jessi and her children move back to Mexico to stay with Emilia, things quickly get complicated for the new family. Emilia struggles with being unable to reveal herself to her children, who have their own suspicions about the woman introduced to them as their aunt. Jessi, meanwhile, is oblivious. “Rita was someone who was a part of her journey and her transition, and I think that is something very personal that Jessi didn’t get to experience,” Gomez told Netflix. “Jessi felt like she lost her partner and would never see her again.”
In her husband’s absence, Jessi returns to the arms of her past lover, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez) — a choice that Emilia, somewhat surprisingly, accepts with grace. She’s built the life for herself that she always dreamed of, and is even making amends for her past crimes by spearheading an NGO centered around finding missing victims of cartel violence. At the same time, her love affair with widow Epifanía is developing.
But Emilia’s new life comes with its own difficulties. “Emilia [doesn’t have her former] physical freedom because she always has to be perfect,” Gascón said. “Society has this requirement for women to always be perfect.”
But when Jessi decides that she’d like to leave with the children and live with Gustavo, Emilia’s perfect facade shatters, and she responds with a mix of maternal possessiveness and the power and freedom she once enjoyed in her former life. “We found these new dimensions for this character,” Gascón said. “She was this very refined woman, [but] she came from a very violent world.” Emilia cuts off Jessi’s bank accounts and demands that she and the children remain with her. And Jessi, baffled at how Emilia could even access her accounts, puts together a desperate plan — she kidnaps Emilia and sends Rita three of her fingers in a box. After making so many people vanish in her own right during her time as a cartel boss, Emilia is now one of the disappeared herself.
Rita moves quickly to rescue Emilia from her kidnappers’ clutches, rolling in with an armed team and a case full of cash. When a firefight breaks out, Emilia and Jessi take cover behind a piece of furniture, and Emilia does what she hasn’t been brave enough to until now: confesses her true identity in song, reminiscing about the good and bad times that she and Jessi have had together. Jessi recognizes her former spouse, but it’s too late — Gustavo stuffs Emilia in the trunk of a car, and they make a break for it. When Jessi demands that they stop, a struggle ensues, and the car flies off the road — killing all three.
A heartbroken Rita informs Jessi and Emilia’s children of the tragic news, and the film ends with the community coming together to sing a final song: “Las Damas que Pasan,” an ode to the lost, and to Emilia. None of them will ever know that she was both the cartel boss who destroyed lives and the charitable woman who tried to restore them, but her transformation is a symbol of the renewal that they all hope for.
Emilia and the actor who brought her to life are very different people, but they share one thing: a desire to constantly improve. “Every time I see myself on-screen, I always find something at fault,” Gascón said. “And this is the first time in my life that I’m able to see myself on-screen and I see nothing bad. This really took me to another place, and I hope to be able to continue to go there and beyond.”
Emilia Pérez is now streaming on Netflix.
