Emilia Perez

I found the trailer for Emilia Perez to be really intriguing (to say the least) so I went to a matinee at the Broadway yesterday.  This crime thriller that is also somehow a musical is incredibly bold and, even though it doesn't always work, it is never boring.  Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana) is an overworked and underappreciated lawyer in Mexico who is disillusioned by the number of violent criminals that she is forced to defend.  After winning a big case, she receives a lucrative offer from Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon), a notorious leader of a drug cartel, that she cannot refuse.  He asks her to help him become the woman he has always wanted to be so she secretly finds him a doctor to perform gender affirming surgeries, arranges for his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and his two children to relocate to Switzerland, and helps him fake his death in return for an exorbitant amount of money.  Manitas begins a new life as Emilia Perez but, four years later, she is desperate to see her children.  She contacts Rita and has her arrange for Jessi and the children to return to Mexico to live with her in the guise of a distant cousin.  As Emilia sheds her old identity, she is still haunted by her violent past so she and Rita create a nonprofit organization to locate the missing victims of her former cartel so she can atone.  She also begins a relationship with Epifania (Adriana Paz).  However, she cannot escape who she really is when Jessi resumes a relationship with Gustavo Brun (Edgar Ramirez), with whom she had been having an affair during the marriage, and takes the children away from her.  I enjoyed the songs individually (none of them are particularly memorable) but the shifts in tone are all over the place with big choreographed group numbers raging against violence and hypocrisy, poignant ballads about identity (my favorite is "Papa" when Emilia's son tells her that she reminds him of his father), a campy sequence detailing the surgeries involved in transitioning, and upbeat pop songs about love.  There are also issues with pacing because the scenes involving the search for those who are missing go on a bit too long while the romance between Emilia and Epifania and the fiery climax both seem a bit rushed.  The theme of living authentically is very compelling but I'm not sure how I feel about the assertion that you can never change who you are because that seems to diminish Emilia's arc as a trans woman (I was especially disturbed by a scene in which Emilia threatens Jessi using the voice she had before she transitioned).  Having said all of that, my attention never waved because everything on the screen is so audacious and all three actresses give amazing performances, particularly Gascon in a powerful double role.  I didn't totally love this (my favorite genre-bending musical is Annette) but I recommend it for its creative swing for the fences.