Emilia Pérez
Josh Lewis

Review by Josh Lewis Pro

Emilia Pérez

2024
★

Watched 14 Nov 2024

The kind of misguided and tasteless arthouse soup only an unchecked Frenchman could deliver and a Cannes audience could eat up. More impressive than how it butchers just about everything it's trying to frivolously sentimentalize about Mexican cartel drug wars and the trans experience is how simply bad it looks and sounds as the comically melodramatic telenovela musical it aspires to be. Anything you might momentarily assume based on clips you'll find circulating online about its "but what a big, bonkers, audacious swing!" credentials are undone by how much of this is for some baffling reason dominated by the aesthetics of a dull, stern crime drama/narco-thriller way more than the occasional nonsensical "verve" you'll see displayed in the cutting and choreography.

I'm not sure if a more appropriately heightened or tonally coherent shooting style would've made its broad stereotypical approach to these complex subjects much better or its bizarre attempt to package them into a quasi-feminist, philanthropic awards darling more interesting, but it's insane to have such an ostentatiously silly premise like this (shoutout to Mark Asch whose comparisons to Sicario and Mrs. Doubtfire I assumed were hyperbolic... nope!) and somehow make an utterly murky, discordant slog out of it. Somehow not a single good song! And while there's certainly effort being put forth by most of the top billing, even its bonafides as an actors showcase are being wildly overstated by the That Oscar Guy subset on here.

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