MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

One of the most acclaimed films of 2024, and the recipient of 13 Oscar nominations, is Emilia Pérez. Directed by the French auteur Jacques Audiard and filmed almost entirely in Spanish, it is a genre-bending mix of ideas: it explores themes involving Mexican drug cartels, political corruption, and transgender issues; it is about redemption and forgiveness; tonally, it veers from heavy drama to absurd comedy, and even includes some action sequences; and, most importantly from the point of view of this review, it is also a fully sung musical containing almost twenty originals songs, each performed by different members of the cast.

The film stars Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora Castro, an ambitious lawyer working in Mexico City, whose work revolves around tackling the corruption inherent in Mexican politics, but who is consistently under-valued and undermined by her male colleagues. Rita is contacted by the violent drug cartel kingpin Juan Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) and is hired to arrange for him to covertly have gender reassignment surgery and then help him fake his own death so he can start a new life elsewhere. Years later Manitas re-emerges with a new identity, Emilia Pérez, but a chance meeting between Rita and Emilia in London results in Emilia’s return to Mexico, where she tries to re-insert herself into the lives of her ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her children by posing as their aunt. Remorseful for her past actions as a criminal, Emilia also wants to help the families of her former victims, and with Rita’s help starts a non-profit organization – but finds that, even as Emilia, she cannot escape Manitas’s legacy.

On the surface Emilia Pérez is a fascinating film. Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who is herself transgender in real life, is outstanding in the leading role, bringing different dimensions and contrasting physicality to her role as Manitas/Emilia. Zoe Saldaña is raw and edgy as the lawyer with a point to prove, and acts as Emilia’s moral compass throughout much of the story. It’s also great to see pop star Selena Gomez stretching her acting chops in a difficult role as Manitas’s confused, damaged ex-wife Jessi. Visually the film is great – Audiard stages the musical numbers with flashy showmanship, and shoots Mexico City in a fascinating style which I guess I’m describing as ‘gritty magical realism’ – is that even a thing?

However, there are several issues that plague the film. Firstly, the film is DEEPLY problematic in terms of how it represents transgender individuals; I’m not going to go into all that here, as there are plenty of other websites that discuss that issue with more depth and sensitivity than I can, except to say that I broadly agree with the issues they raise. Secondly, the film also reinforces all the age-old negative stereotypes about what Mexican culture and society is – again, not going to go in to all that here. And finally, and most importantly from my point of view, there is the fact that this is a musical.

The music for Emilia Pérez is by the married French composer/singer-songwriters Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais, with a few additional lyrics on certain songs by director Audiard. Camille was formerly the lead singer of the French band Nouvelle Vague, and may be familiar to film music fans for her work with Michael Giacchino on Ratatouille in 2007, or with Hans Zimmer and Richard Harvey on Le Petit Prince in 2015. Audiard always intended for the film to be a musical; Ducol and Dalmais were brought into the project even before the first draft of the script was written, and were integral to the process of how the final film was structured. The three of them adopted stylistics from numerous different genres and styles, blending together elements from pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, punk, electronica, and some references to traditional Mexican music, resulting in a soundtrack which is massively eclectic. I also really, really dislike it.

Emilia Pérez didn’t need to be a musical; it was a fascinating enough film without it. Usually, I love musicals. Some of my favorite films of all time feature scenes where the characters incongruously burst out into elaborately staged song-and-dance sequences, and in almost all instances I can set aside the inherent ludicrousness of that and just go with it as a cinematic conceit. There’s magic in movie musicals. Unfortunately, for me, none of this worked in Emilia Pérez. There is a massive tonal disconnect that occurs in certain scenes that completely ruined the film for me; one minute, a character will be in mortal danger with a gun pointed at their head, and then seconds later they are bursting into song. The hyper-realistic way Audiard pitches the dramatic scenes, and then the blatant staginess of the musical scenes, work against each other instead of being complementary, resulting in the effectiveness of one being entirely undermined by the other. In the end, I simply couldn’t take it seriously.

It also didn’t help that, for the most part, I thought the songs were awful. Anyone who knows me knows that I have very broad taste, and that I can find things to enjoy in almost every genre of music in the world. The one exception to this has always been hip-hop and R&B. I love *classic* R&B – especially the Motown era, Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke and people like that – but contemporary R&B, hip-hop, and rap, has just never appealed to me. And that’s fine; taste is taste. Not everything is for me. But that also means I had a lot of trouble connecting to Emilia Pérez.

Then on top of that there is the language barrier; the songs were originally written in French, before being converted into Spanish with the help of Mexican translators Karla Aviles and Ignacio Chávez, who were also asked to bring some specific references to Mexican culture into the lyrics to make them more authentic. While I acknowledge that some of this might be a ‘lost in translation’ issue going from French to Spanish and then to English via the film’s subtitles, unfortunately I often found the resultant lyrics to be clunky to the point of near stupidity, with unintentionally awkward phrasing and odd word choices.

I also found the choices they made in terms of what to sing about extremely weird. I’m not sure we really needed to hear Rita singing about all the different medical procedures involved in gender reassignment surgery, while dancing through a clinic, in “La Vaginoplastia”. I also don’t think the delicate conversation between Rita and Israeli surgeon Wasserman (played by Mark Ivanir) needed to be sung in “Lady”. Even the two most lauded songs – “El Mal” and “Mi Camino,” both of which have been nominated for Oscars – I found mostly underwhelming.

“El Mal” is sung mostly by Rita and takes place at a benefit dinner for wealthy donors contributing to Emilia’s foundation; in it, while Emilia is giving a speech, Rita flounces around the room pointing out different people and explaining how and why they are all corrupt in different ways. It’s a fantasy in Rita’s head, and as she sings she interacts with different people, jumping on tables, lap dancing with some, burying the faces of others in her crotch, all amid fierce choreography. It’s a fast paced, aggressive, highly rhythmic song, performed more in an angry whisper than traditionally sung, but again I just didn’t connect with the style and tone of it in any way.

“Mi Camino” is performed in character by Selena Gomez as Manitas’s ex-wife Jessi. Ducol and Dalmais explained that Audiard wanted it to sound like an 1980s hit people were dancing to in a nightclub, and the resulting song blends live orchestral elements with Latin percussion, layered choir vocals, and synthesizers to create a ‘fusion of nostalgic and modern sounds.’ In context, it is sung by Jessi and her new boyfriend Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez) at a karaoke bar, and is intended to be a love song representing how she has moved on from Manitas and is embracing a better relationship. Of all the songs in Emilia Pérez “Mi Camino” is my favorite, musically, both in terms of its actual sound, and because it feels like a self-contained song and not just an awkward way of forwarding the plot.

I’m not going to go into the rest of the songs, but I do want to touch on the film’s score, which was also written by Ducol and Dalmais, and has also been nominated for an Academy Award. The score is much more in line with the music Audiard usually has in his films, being much more subdued and understated; Audiard’s most prominent prior films, such as De Battre Mon Coeur S’est Arrêté, Un Prophète, and De Rouille et d’Os, all featured low-key scores by Alexandre Desplat, and the sound of this score is along similar lines to those earlier works, albeit with perhaps even less individual personality. Considering that the songs in the film play the most prominent role and do all the heavy lifting, there is actually not much left for the score to do other than provide some unobtrusive atmospheric texture, and so that’s what it does. However in this context the score is so unobtrusive that, for the most part, it is essentially irrelevant in terms of the emotional framework and narrative it provides. It basically exists as a slightly less dull alternative to silence.

The sound palette of the score is simple: slow and elongated string chords backed by slow and elongated electronic textures – some of which undergo significant intentional distortion in post-production – and a variety of vocal sounds, most of which are provided by Dalmais, and many of which have also been distorted. Recurring thematic content is basically zero (more on that in a moment), and there are little to no references to the songs in the score, but one or two cues are noteworthy enough to warrant a mention.

The opening cue, “Fierro Viejo (Choir Version),” is an odd one as it is a choral variation on a real-life jingle advertising the sale of scrap metal that millions of Mexicans are intimately familiar with. Ducol and Dalmais use it as a sort of pervasive chant in the background, a representative sound unique to Mexico City, and it crops up several times in the score proper as a motif for the place, either sung with lyrics (“Fierro Viejo/La Ciudad”), or used as part of the underlying rhythms in other cues. The second cue, “El Alegato (Piano Version),” is as the title suggests a downbeat piano version of the song of the same name, and which features excerpts from the same performed with quivering emotion by Saldaña and Gascón.

After that the score settles down into a series of mostly similar-sounding cues which, as I mentioned, fill the gaps between the songs with something other than silence, but do very little else to establish an individual identity. It turns out that there are actually a couple of recurring ideas in the score; the first, which appears in several cues all called “Subiendo,” appears to represent the personal ambitions of different characters – Rita’s growing career, Emilia’s need for redemption, and so on. The core of each cue is based on a bank of off-kilter harmonics, strings and electronics, with heavily processed voice singing in Spanish. The ‘strings version’ towards the end of the score is a bit more tonal, with a reflective, sorrowful emotional core, and then the ‘choir version’ sees the lyrical part of the cue performed by a vocal group without any processing.

The four cues all called “Desire” act as an all-encompassing love theme for various individuals, and offer a bank of slow strings, soft electronics, and abstract vocalizations, overlaid with a downbeat electric guitar melody that is the most clearly thematic part of the entire score. The ‘strings version’ from the finale of the album is perhaps the most traditionally score-like cue of them all, and has a warm and cathartic emotional element that I quite like. I also quite like the two “Beatificación” cues which are built around a melancholic central melody backed by light hip-hop beats, a small chorus, and chimes, which sometimes give it some liturgical church music overtones.

As for the rest of the score… well, it is very, very minimal, doing little and conveying even less. Some cues feature dialogue clips by the three main actresses, which is annoying, and several cues feature more of Dalmais’s peculiar vocal stylings. The vocal parts of “El Despertar” are raw and aggressive, and are accompanied by the sampled sounds of helicopters and medical machinery. “La Pelea” is darker in tone and features one of the score’s most prominent uses of brass. “3 Dedos” is similarly aggressive and harsh, and occasionally feels a bit Hans Zimmer-esque in places, with electronic pulses that echo his work on the Dark Knight trilogy. Everything else is little more than instrumental ambiance, leaving no lasting impression whatsoever. I am frankly astonished that this score has been the recipient of so much critical and industry praise; matters of personal taste aside, the score has little to no impact on the film itself, and in terms of its Oscar nomination, I am surprised it has not fallen afoul of rule 2F, subsection 2, which states that ‘a score shall not be eligible if it has been diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs or any music not composed specifically for the film by the submitting composer’. C’est la vie.

I wish I liked Emilia Pérez more than I do. I really do. It’s a unique, genre-defying attempt to do something bold and different in a time when far too much of mainstream cinema is sequels and prequels and shared cinematic universes based on existing IP’s. From that point of view Emilia Pérez is worthy of significant praise. Unfortunately it is marred by its poor representations of both transgender people and Mexican culture in general, and the whole thing is further spoiled by its mostly poor songs and ineffective score.

Buy the Emilia Pérez soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• El Alegato (performed by Zoe Saldaña) (3:33)
• Todo y Nada (performed by Zoe Saldaña) (2:16)
• El Encuentro (performed by Karla Sofía Gascón) (1:13)
• La Vaginoplastia (performed by Zoe Saldaña) (2:34)
• Lady (performed by Zoe Saldaña and Mark Ivanir) (2:46)
• Deseo (performed by Camille and Karla Sofia Gascón) (2:34)
• Por Casualidad (performed by Camille, Karla Sofia Gascón and Zoe Saldaña) (2:06)
• Bienvenida (performed by Selena Gomez) (2:14)
• Mis Siete Hermanas y Yo (performed by Xiomara Ahumada Quito) (1:49)
• Papá (performed by Juan Pablo Monterrubio and Karla Sofia Gascón) (2:22)
• Para (performed by Aitza Terán and Iván Ruiz de Velasco) (2:49)
• El Mal (performed by Camille, Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofia Gascón) (3:38)
• El Amor (performed by Camille, Karla Sofia Gascón and Adriana Paz) (3:26)
• Mi Camino (performed by Selena Gomez) (3:44)
• Perdóname (performed by Camille and Karla Sofia Gascón) (2:14)
• Las Damas Que Pasan (performed by Adriana Paz) (4:07)
• Fierro Viejo (Choir Version) (1:10)
• El Alegato (Piano Version) (feat. Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofia Gascón) (1:30)
• Subiendo (Part 1) (2:29)
• Fierro Viejo/La Ciudad (1:47)
• Fantasmas (0:25)
• El Rapto (1:52)
• Claroscuro (Part 1) (2:01)
• Claroscuro (Part 2) (feat. Karla Sofia Gascón and Mark Ivanir) (1:54)
• El Rayo (0:38)
• El Despertar (1:44)
• Subiendo (Part 2) (2:04)
• Cara a Cara (1:05)
• Desire (Alternate Version) (1:32)
• El Reclutamiento (1:44)
• Disonancia (Part 1) (1:01)
• Disonancia (Part 2) (feat. Karla Sofia Gascón and Selena Gomez) (2:26)
• La Pelea (2:22)
• El Trio (feat. Karla Sofia Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, and Selena Gomez) (2:04)
• 3 Dedos (2:04)
• Beatificación (Part 1) (5:04)
• Beatificación (Part 2) (2:19)
• El Fuego (1:35)
• Desire (2:06)
• Subiendo (Strings Version) (1:05)
• Subiendo (Choir Version) (1:01)
• Desire (Strings Version) (1:53)
• Desire (Choir Version) (feat. Yadam and Paloma Pradal) (1:58)

Sony Masterworks (2024)

Running Time: 92 minutes 18 seconds

Music composed by Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais. Conducted by Clément Ducol. Orchestrations by Jehan Stefan, Clément Ducol, Vili Robert Ollila, and Simon Nathan. Additional music by Maxence Dussère. Recorded and mixed by Stephane Reichard, Nicolas Duport and Tom Elmhirst. Edited by Maxence Dussère and Matthieu Lefevre. Album produced by Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais.