Almost halfway through a Cannes festival with more disappointments than successes in the programming of the official section – read Coppola and Schrader as the main exponents – it had to be another veteran filmmaker, Jacques Audiard, who lifted the spirits with Emilia Perez, a risky musical about a dangerous Mexican drug trafficker who wants to become a woman and is already aiming straight for the Palme d’Or. It would be the second for the 72-year-old French filmmaker, who already achieved it in 2015 with the immigration drama Deephan and collected in 2009 the Grand Jury Prize for A Prophet.
After competing again three years ago with Paris, District 13, this time he has returned with a very delicate material that in other hands could have ended in disaster, but the director of Of rust and bone always has the right balance to impact the viewer with a story of redemption that exhibits the corruption embedded in Mexican politics and justice, in addition to addressing the victims of sexist violence and those disappeared due to drug trafficking.
All this bathed in the form of a musical and filmed in Spanish with the leading role of Selena Gómez, Zoe Saldaña and the discovery of the Madrid trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who has revolutionized the Croisette with her double interpretation of the narco Manitas and her trans version Emilia Perez .
“In Mexico I am shocked by the femicides and the cases of missing persons, all those regions where you cannot go. The fall of democracy is unbearable for me,” the director said at a press conference about a film whose script arose from a book in which a character appeared who wanted to be a woman, but the novel did not tell what happened to him. . At first he conceived it as an opera, although it later ended up becoming a musical, one of the few genres that Audiard had not yet experimented with.
A film that has never pretended to be a documentary, but rather a reading about Mexico, absorbs music, culture, cinema, but with a great space for the imagination. “It is a more poetic than Mexican film,” he said.
Manitas has a wife (Gómez) and two children, he controls drug trafficking and has a trail of deaths behind him, but he has never been happy in his skin. He wants with all his might to be someone else, a woman, and to do so he hires the services of a lawyer (Saldaña) tired of defending the bad guys on duty and not having a decent salary. Handyman offers her a large sum of money to find her the best surgeon and she, surprised by her proposal, gets it.
The protagonist of Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar shows off her true appearance and talent with dance here, performing with ease in demanding choreographies. “There are injustices and corruption in all countries but that has not taken away my respect and admiration for Mexican culture,” the actress born in the Dominican Republic said, highlighting the “creative freedom” that Audiard gave them during filming.
Gascón was born in Madrid in 1972 with the name Carlos Gascón and has lived in Mexico since 2009, where he became popular especially for a role in the film Nos los noble (2013) and for his participation in soap operas. It was in 2016 when he began his transformation into a woman. “At first Audiard only wanted me to play the part of Handyman, but in the end I managed to convince him that I could be Emilia too,” which made it easier to closely follow the evolution of the character. “What he has given me is a gift,” she says happily.
The actress insists that “being trans is just an anecdote,” although she has confessed that “they have threatened me with death just for existing” and that she is fed up with all the insults she has received “for transitioning to a woman,” the same process that his character experiences in Audiard’s film. And she continued: “Trans people are people like everyone else, I am neither dumber nor smarter, we can dedicate ourselves to the things for which we have fought.”
At the gala screening yesterday, the film was the most applauded with nine minutes of applause, and both Gascón, Gómez and Saldaña could not suppress tears of emotion.
