On demand: "Emilia Pérez"

The novelty item in this year's awards race - and a three-time prizewinner at Cannes 2024 - Emilia Pérez is a Netflix-backed musical crime drama in which the French writer-director Jacques Audiard takes the name of his production company (Why Not Productions) as his watchwords. Why not do a crime movie about a ruthless cartel boss who undergoes gender reassignment surgery so as to evade the authorities? (Not least as, in theory, it feminises a genre in which Audiard has long sought to puzzle out new directions and horizons.) Why not make a contemporary drama where a substantial percentage of the dialogue - from banalities like "hello, nice to meet you" to the already much-memed medical exposition "from penis to vaginaaa" - is trilled as it would have been in those old Jacques Demy musicals? Why not take the Netflix dollar, especially as any such pitch would likely have been laughed out of any meetings Audiard might have had within the risk-averse remains of the studio system? Why not cast prominent American faces (Zoe Saldana as the heroine's lawyer, Selena Gomez as her heartbroken former wife) to bolster its hopes of finding an audience? And in a year without an obvious Oscar frontrunner, why not take something this flagrantly sui generis under consideration as a serious Best Picture contender?

At risk of typecasting myself as Mr. Rational, there are reasons to answer all of the above in the negative, many helpfully provided by the film itself. For starters, the memory of Leos Carax's comparably batshit Annette, a film that clearly helped get Emilia Pérez over the finish line, hasn't long receded, and that curio had fully orchestrated songs by Sparks to sell it, where Audiard (working with the composers Camille and Clément Ducol) offers only musical doodles, asides, footnotes. Much of Emilia Pérez proves sketchy, when not merely slaphappy: it's one of those big swings where the bat itself flies off into the night sky, never to be retrieved. Both the writing and direction are blasé at exactly those points where precision was needed for the film to function on any level. The opening scenes demonstrate no real idea of Mexico, beyond narcos, mariachis and football, but then we get not much more of an idea of anywhere else this globetrotting plot meanders (Israel, Switzerland, London), either. Critically - and this really does seem like Emilia Pérez's fatal flaw - this script offers no clear sense of why its heroine (Karla Sofía Gascón) transitions in the first place, whether it's just a swerve or part of some greater masterplan to make the life she wants for herself. If it's meant as just a swerve - a means of going undercover or underground, after the fashion of many more generic entertainments - then I fear Audiard's film carries trace elements of that culture-war bullshit that seeks to portray trans folk as slippery and suspicious, hellbent on wreaking havoc on polite society.

Let's give Audiard, who's made some very smart and engrossing films in the not too distant past, the benefit of the doubt - let's say he's not just cynically co-opting the transgender theme to foster the festival-steps sensation even our more celebrated arthouse directors now have to court to make a splash in a stagnant marketplace. There are passages here where the aim appears no more contentious than aping Almodóvar, where the camera contents to gaze up adoringly at the actresses who give the movie whatever energy and verve it has. (One point in Emilia Pérez's favour: shot by the emergent Paul Guilhaume, who did Ava and The Five Devils, it's photogenic in a nocturnal way.) Yet Almodóvar's best films have found a way of finessing their contrivance, easing us past any implausibility while generating an emotional heft that Emilia Pérez really... doesn't? At all? And doesn't even gesture towards anything like a convincing central conflict? This, we are left to conclude, is what happens when a heroine makes a big decision for reasons of screenwriting, and when a director takes a punt for the purposes of facilitating an eyecatching red carpet premiere. I'm amazed the Cannes jury fell for this ruse, but in a year when The Substance won a screenplay prize, Deadpool & Wolverine - a non-film in which Ryan Reynolds tries repeatedly to show us something he thinks is funny on his phone for three hours - grossed a billion dollars, and a convicted sex offender was elected to the White House for the second time, all bets are clearly off. Nothing makes sense anymore; we probably shouldn't expect our movies, film festivals and awards ceremonies to correct or otherwise counter that. Harold and the Purple Crayon for Best Picture: fuck it, why not?

Emilia Pérez is now streaming via Netflix.