Imagine a world in which Stephen Sondheim made Sicario. Yes, that Stephen Sondheim; yes, that 2015 thriller about the world of Mexican drug cartels. Got that? Good.
Now add in Selena Gomez as the wife of a narco who, in a moment of deep grief and remembrance, utters the line, “My pussy still hurts when I think of you” — which, to be fair, sounds a lot more poetic in Spanish. She believes her husband, a major drug lord for the Los Globales cartel, had been murdered. This is not true.
Rather, her spouse has faked their death so they could transition to being a woman, and is now Emilia Pérez, who runs a charity dedicated to locating victims of the drug wars. They’re also living in the same house, because “Aunt Emilia” misses their kids. And regarding our earlier reference to Sondheim: Yes, the whole thing is a musical.
A strong contender for being the wildest movie to screen at this year’s Cannes — and we’re talking about the same film festival that just gave us Megalopolis earlier in the week — Emilia Pérez is one of those films in which description on a page can’t do justice to the delirium onscreen. French director Jacques Audiard has always been a filmmaker who loves to mix it up, shift genre gears and take stylistic risks; it’s hard to believe that a single director made the greatest prison thriller ever ( A Prophet ), a remake of James Toback’s Fingers ( The Beat That My Heart Skipped ), a daffy Western ( The Sister Brothers ) and a romance in.