A musical, pulpy crime thriller, ‘Emilia Pérez’ swings for the fences

MANILA, Philippines — There is so much going on in “Emilia Pérez,” the audacious musical/melodrama/crime-thriller from filmmaker Jacques Audiard, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer ambition of it all.

There is obvious craft and moments of true transcendence, beauty and horror. Set around Mexico City, this is a movie about family, about ambition, about the possibility of change, cartels, human disappearances, gender-affirmation, money and corruption.

Sometimes the characters break into fantastical musical numbers: Some are filled with rage, others with joy and hope. Other times the songs come out in barely a whisper. And yet even with all that life and color and passion on screen, there’s a distinct rift between all those big emotions that the characters are cycling through and what the audience is feeling, which is practically nothing. It’s almost as if “Emilia Pérez” forgot to invite us along for the ride.

And it is quite a ride: One day a cartel boss named Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) has a smart, but undervalued lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) kidnapped. Manitas wants gender confirmation surgery, and for Rita to handle the logistics: Hiring the discreet surgeon, faking Manitas’ death and transporting the wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two kids to their new home in Switzerland. In return, Rita will get rich. Somehow, this is only the first act.

Four years later, Rita’s gotten a glow up. Gone are her bush eyebrows and frumpy suit, replaced with the kind of grooming only money and genetics like Saldaña’s can produce. And she’s leading a cosmopolitan life in London, something that we get to see all too briefly, when she meets another woman who’s gone through a major transformation, Emilia Pérez (Gascón).

Audiard plays briefly with the idea that Rita assumes Emilia is there to kill her, to rid the world of any remaining evidence of those who know what happened. In actuality, she just misses her kids and wants them back in Mexico to live with her. It’s up to Rita to get them to move once more, with Emilia, posing as an aunt they’ve never met before if you’re wondering where all those “Mrs. Doubtfire” comparisons come into play. (The bloody “Sicario” stuff is yet to come).

Saldaña lends a captivating fierceness to Rita, despite being a terribly underwritten character. It’s strange to spend so much time with someone and feel entirely detached from who they are and what they want. She just follows others around, a receptacle for everyone else’s decisions with little arc or agency of her own.

Early on in the film Rita debates (in song) with a plastic surgeon in Hong Kong about whether or not changing the body has any effect on the soul. He doesn’t think so. She does, and even goes a step further, singing “changing the soul changes society, changing society changes everything.” It’s a lovely idea that the film handles clumsily in its maximalist, go-for-broke way that values massive set-pieces and high drama over authentic emotion.

At first Emilia seems entirely changed, no longer the vindictive, jealous, violent cartel leader she once was. She is soft spoken, empathetic and happy. She starts a foundation to find all the disappeared people and give their families the chance of a proper burial and farewell. She even finds love. And yet she can’t handle watching Jessi move on. It’s the stuff of soap operas — and not necessarily the fun ones. Here, it could even read as dangerously reductive.

Jessi sometimes feels like she’s part of an entirely different film, or rather a music video that seems to be paying homage somehow to Pedro Almodóvar, David Lynch and Robert Rodriguez. It is fun and wild at times, and Gomez fully commits to the bit of this woman who is being gaslit into insanity. But she and the film crescendo into absurdity, with little in the way of relief or catharsis. After all those big ideas, all those grand themes and genre-subverting gestures, we’re left with shockingly little to hold on to.

“Emilia Pérez,” a Netflix release, starts streaming on Nov. 13.