A Mexican drug lord comes out as a trans woman : NPR

TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new movie musical “Emilia Perez” tells the story of a Mexican cartel boss who undergoes gender affirmation surgery and becomes a woman. The film, which is currently in selected theaters, will start streaming on Netflix on November 13. And it won two big prizes at Cannes, including a shared best actress award for its four women leads. Our critic-at-large John Powers says it’s daring and fun and promises that you’ll never have seen a movie quite like it.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Whenever I hear the words movie musical, I think of upbeat crowd-pleasers like “Singin’ In The Rain” or “My Fair Lady,” with “West Side Story” and “Oliver! ” at the darker end of the spectrum. Yet we’re deep into an era that keeps pushing the musical into ever-weirder and murkier territory, from Leos Carax’s “Annette,” where a stand-up comic murders his opera singer wife, to Joshua Oppenheimer’s upcoming “The End,” a tale about the last family on Earth. Heck, even the joyless “Joker” sequel is filled with singing.

None of these musicals is any wilder than “Emilia Perez.” The latest effort from Jacques Audiard, the terrific French writer-director who’s always trying something new. Shot mainly in Spanish on a soundstage Mexico City, this stylish new movie centers on four different women. It drops them into a genre-bending, gender-bending plot that includes kidnapping, mass graves, sex reassignment clinics, fiery deaths and a processional finale that borders on sanctification. If you can guess where it’s headed, you’re smarter than me.

An inspired Zoe Saldana plays Rita Mora Castro, a brainy Mexico City attorney stuck working behind the scenes for a lazy lawyer who gets rich men off after they kill their wives. Her future looks dim until a drug lord, Manitas Del Monte, offers her a deal. He’ll make her rich, and she’ll help him realize his lifelong dream to become a woman – then help him disappear and set up a whole new life. When they meet again four years later in London, the once-scruffy Manitas has been happily reborn as stylish Emilia Perez. Both are wonderfully played by the Spanish-born trans actress Karla Sofia Gascon.

Although her identity has changed, Emilia can’t abandon all of her old life. She wants to be with the children she fathered back in Mexico with Manitas’ young wife, Jessi, a lost soul, played by Selena Gomez. Again, Rita sets things up. Then she helps Emilia start to atone for her past by creating an NGO for victims of Mexico’s bloody narco trade. It’s here that Emilia falls in love with Epifania, nicely played by Adriana Paz, the widow of a murdered man. Now, as it leap frogs between contradictory emotional registers, “Emilia Perez” is a bumpy, free-wheeling ride with 16 songs by the famous French singer Camille and composer Clement Ducol. These range from small, sentimental tunes to big, oververtly political numbers about the machismo and corruption of Mexico’s ruling elite.

Although their music is good, I do wonder how Mexicans will react to seeing the horrific violence of its drug wars folded into a musical about a narco changing his gender identity. After all, it’s one thing for “Sweeney Todd” to ring dark laughter from making human meat pies in Victoria in London, quite another to have people singing and dancing in a present-day Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have been murdered, especially when it’s still happening. Then again, musicals are about creative freedom. Not only do they specialize in the lyrical pleasures of music and color and movement, they are so unabashedly stylized that the rules of realism don’t apply.

We’re obviously in the realm of fables. We accept that Emilia’s transition is a painless rebirth, that she has shaken off most of the ruthlessness that made her a drug baron and has become someone new and better. Of course, even fairy tales need something human to hold onto. What tethers us is the quartet of female stars, with Saldana and Gomez doing show-stopping numbers and Paz anchoring her scenes in down-to-Earth emotion. Although Saldana has never been better, the movie finally belongs to Gascon. Knowing this story from the inside, she gives Emilia and the yearning Manitas a gravity and conflicted complexity the story doesn’t always earn.

Although telling a trans story might strike some as a bit trendy, Audiard’s movies have always been fascinated by huge, personal transformations, for good or ill, be it the sales clerk and a self-made hero who reinvents himself by passing as a French resistance stalwart, or Marion Cotillard’s orca trainer in “Rust And Bone,” who learns to live again after losing her legs. In “Emilia Perez,” Audiard suggests that Emilia’s liberation from her male body has freed her to be kind and generous. Yet, the film also has a political point to make. For Emilia to be truly free of her past, it’s not enough to simply find inner peace in being a woman. She needs to change the wounded Mexico around her as much as she’s changed herself.

MOSLEY: John Powers reviewed the new movie “Emilia Perez.”

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “MI CAMINO”)

SELENA GOMEZ: (Singing in Spanish).

MOSLEY: On tomorrow’s show, stress can make you itchy, so you may have been doing a lot of scratching over the last few months. We’ll talk about what researchers are learning about the causes of maddening itch and new ways of treating it with Annie Lowrey. Her Atlantic article is about that research and dealing with her own severe itch. I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “MI CAMINO”)

GOMEZ: (Singing in Spanish).

MOSLEY: FRESH AIR’s executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly Seavy-Nesper and Sabrina Siewert. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I’m Tonya Mosley.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “MI CAMINO”)

GOMEZ: (Singing in Spanish).

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