More of a lightning rod than a proper film, Emilia Pérez was always destined for attention. Defying both the norms of the medium and the tentative niceties of modern cinema will afford you some eyeballs, and Jacques Audiard’s latest never allows its freak flag to descend to half mast. The French writer/director, not one to shy away from either ambition or bombast, has truly outdone himself here, concocting a musical crime thriller, set outside of his home country, and with a trans woman’s story at the center of the frame. It’s the kind of gambit that’s guaranteed to garner either fervent worship or a steady stream of bile, and judging by the early critical reports and award season punditry, both fires are burning steadily. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, an idiom that Emilia Pérez seems determined to push to its breaking point. The discussion that surrounds it is comprised of ‘should’s, ‘shouldn’t’s, ‘how’s and ‘why’s, which probably suits everyone involved just fine. It’s the ‘what’ they need to be concerned about.

Set in a modern day Mexico, Audiard’s tenth feature opens on Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a stressed-out lawyer who erupts into an aggravated song-and-dance number through bustling city streets as soon as the opening credits recede. Her professional dissatisfaction soon receives an unlikely complication in the form of a clandestine meeting with notorious crime boss Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) He has a proposition; arrange a secret gender reassignment, as well as a one way ticket out of the country, and there’s a foreign bank account with your name on it. An agreement leads to a successful execution of the plan, but as Audiard’s screenplay incessantly (and perhaps problematically) argues, being done with the past doesn’t mean the past is done with you.

Personal history, and exactly how much of the past one can erase with their actions in the present, are top of mind here, and not just in front of the camera. The movie was always set to be a tricky proposition with a straight white man at the helm, but the issues of representation are deepened by the film’s location, and attendant exoticism. The unsettling, omnipresent fetishization of Mexico City’s seedy underbelly, complete with a patronizing pat on the back for all the little people in the big fight, might have gone undetected if we weren’t so aware of the storytellers. It’s not just Audiard; the casting of Selena Gomez immediately reads as a marketing ploy, and Saldaña, known primarily for her tentpole work in projects like Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy, adds the metatextual layer of a performer using real world pain to prove her actorly bonafides. Blame it on our modern sensibilities if you like, but in the year of our lord 2024, the whole thing feels like a hollow provocation, content to stir conversation to which it has little to add.

Maybe that’s too callous a reading, but assuming more impassioned intent here might actually make things worse, or at least more lazily constructed. In faking her own death to start a new life, Manitas, who comes to bear the film’s titular moniker, literalizes the concept of dead naming, making the movie’s insistence on her prior self utterly confounding. Audiard’s screenplay turns her transformation into a form of dress-up, constantly daring those in her orbit to call our protagonist’s bluff, treating her reassignment as a costume. A trans story probably shouldn’t have this much in common with Mrs. Doubtfire, a kinship that persists through the movie’s eventual lionization of its key figure. By then it’s impossible to know up from down; is Emilia still to blame for Manitas’ misdeeds, or has she truly remade herself into a different person? And why in god’s name do we have to keep aligning the two? 

At least we have Gascón as a steady hand at the wheel in these choppy waters. Playing both manifestations of the character, the Spanish actress is convincingly menacing and invitingly warm in turn, with the otherwise questionable screenplay providing a true showcase for an unlikely performer. Whatever heart the movie has belongs to her, though its spectacle is firmly in Saldaña’s grasp. Whether dancing, singing, rapping, or emoting, the Marvel alum is something to behold, and where other performances are praised for their effortlessness, her’s is an exercise in sweat equity. She attacks the material like a hungry predator, digging in with a ferocity that’s sure to leave dirt under the nails. It’s unfair to juxtapose either Saldaña or Gascón against a less seasoned thespian like Gomez, whose chops aren’t so much missing as misplaced, though Audiard and company don’t do her any favors when it comes to the project’s musical aspirations.

The pop star’s pipes are hardly put to use throughout the film’s runtime, primarily relegated to an awkward, bedroom-set solo and an even stranger duet that won’t be spoiled here. This, again, reads as a form of needling, though avoiding the songs here might be a blessing in disguise. Largely employing a sort of operatic sing-talking rather than proper standalone numbers, the score of Emilia Pérez doesn’t lay claim to a single earworm, obnoxious far more often than ingratiating. A movie like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg gets away with a similar soundtrack by stuffing the frame with inviting visuals and ravishing colors. This one is dark, dingy, and devoid of style, a musical conceived by someone without any perceptible affinity for the genre. It would make one question why the choice was made in the first place if the film’s drooling desire for attention wasn’t so brazen. 

Emilia Pérez is the rare movie whose glaring deficiencies slowly reveal themselves in the days after your encounter. The sheer chutzpah on display is enough to elide its defects in the moment, and to suggest that, despite its death defying high wire act, the whole enterprise might have been worthwhile in a different set of hands. For all the plaudits Audiard has received over the course of his career, he simply doesn’t have the goods, or proper outlook, to get this thing over the line. It needs a lighter touch, a greater sense of playfulness, and a director with a sincere interest in song and dance. Audiard applies brute force, and his straight face is the last one we need to see when the flick’s telenovela instincts kick in during the third act. It’s a whole lot to take on and take in, and while it’s easy to admire the sheer quantity of offerings on display, it never comes close to congealing. You can call it ambitious or challenging or brave, but the best word to summarize Emilia Pérez is bad.