Emilia Perez is an unbelievably audacious film that feels like if Pedro Almodovar remade Mrs. Doubtfire as a searing musical crime drama. There’s so much going on in this movie — narratively, structurally, musically, theatrically, politically — that it almost shouldn’t work, which makes its quality all the more impressive.
The story, which Jacques Audiard loosely adapted from Boris Razon’s novel Écoute, begins with Zoe Saldaña as Rita, a talented criminal defense attorney who’s overwhelmed and underpaid and spiritually lost. One day, she gets a phone call from a powerful stranger, who turns out to be a cartel kingpin named Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascón). Manitas has a secret, extremely lucrative request for Rita: to help him disappear from his life — including his children and his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) — and seek gender confirmation surgery to live as a woman.
What follows is operatic in every sense, at turns melodramatic, heart-wrenching, and endlessly mutative. Manitas transitions in a quietly affecting series of scenes and becomes the luminous Emilia Perez, who, years later, finds Rita again to ask for help reconnecting with her family. Emilia, pretending to be one of Manitas’s distant relatives, invites a confused Jessi and her kids back into her life and home.
Under this unorthodox new arrangement, all of the women and the children blossom. Rita and Emilia become like sisters and eventually open a nonprofit that seeks, in some ways, to right Emi.