Reseñas de la crítica

Emilia Pérez is an excellent calling card for Audiard, a film that truly spotlights everything he’s capable of doing as a remarkable director.

Gascón’s generosity and deftness as a performer allow her, in scene after scene, to push past such limits. Right up to the ending—which had me clapping a hand to my mouth in shock, then bursting into tears—she keeps finding newer and deeper ways to be Emilia Pérez, a character (and a movie) that’s all about the never-finished project of learning to become yourself.

The musical numbers are exuberant, extravagant in feeling, without being overly polished. This isn’t a movie about showing off how much money you’ve spent but about how willing you are to go for broke.

Audiard has created an elaborate frame for Emilia, whose desire to become her true self is moving. Hers is at once a personal truth and a new kind of heroic quest, one that the offscreen world has grotesquely politicized. Audiard has created Emilia to startle and divert, but it’s Gascón’s performance that centers and grounds the story, and it’s the actress who finally gives the movie real stakes. She is its heart and soul both.

It’s a wild, genre-bending ride, a musical that sizzles with outrageous passion and outrageous camp. It’s as if Pedro Almodóvar teamed up with John Waters.

His work represents an inversion of the relationship between subject matter and narrative: instead of relying on the formal devices of storytelling to elucidate the stories’ characters and milieus, he squeezes the life out of characters and subjects in order to fit the procrustean limits of an efficient story. “Emilia Pérez” presents twists and turns that exhaust themselves in the strain to stoke excitement; the movie is a wild ride to nowhere.

A fascinating story told by unconventional means, the saga of Emilia Pérez can be mesmerizing thanks to the performances from the cast and the vision of its director.

Emilia Pérez manages to arrest and intrigue, if only because you truly don’t know what the frenetic narrative’s next move is (even its genre clunkily shifts between tense thriller, telenovela, and crime caper). If you don’t expect intelligence and embrace the spectacle, it’s not such a bad trip.

The purpose of this film is so clearly to impress people with its audacity—to create something as preposterous as a musical about a trans former drug lord and do it in an overly stylistic manner that dazzles the senses while making festival audiences feel good about themselves for having supported something like this.

For all its prickly aesthetic and thematic components, there's an enticing lusciousness to "Emilia Pérez" derived from that over-the-top saturation of hammered-in ideas in combination with dazzling and dizzying imagery.

Audiard's brilliantly conceived and executed film moves from one highlight to another, erasing the line between singing, dancing and acting, fusing them into something that keeps the movie blazing. "Emilia Pérez" means to shake you and does it ever.

But he’s also made one of his most satisfying movie movies to date by centering the experiences of three (and eventually four) fierce women, rather than his usual brooding men. Audiard pushes them all into a type of feverish, Almodovar-adjacent melodrama that suits his instinct for sensorial cinema.