Already in the equator of a Cannes festival with more disappointments than successes in the programming of the official section – Coppola and Schrader as the main exponents – it had to be another veteran filmmaker, Jacques Audiard, who raised the encouragement of the staff with Emilia Perez, a risky musical about a dangerous Mexican drug trafficker with a wife and children who wishes to completely change his life and become a woman, who is aiming as a firm candidate for the Palme d’Or. It would be the second for the 72-year-old French filmmaker, who already won it in 2015 with the immigration drama Deephan and collected the Grand Jury Prize in 2009 for A Prophet.
After competing again three years ago with Paris, Distrito 13, this time Audiard has returned with extremely delicate material that walks a tightrope and with which the director of De óxido y hueso always finds the right balance to impact the ‘spectator with a story of redemption that talks about the corruption embedded in Mexico, the disappeared due to drug trafficking and the victims of male violence.
All this filmed in Spanish and accompanied by a brilliant staging with witty musical numbers and the leading role of Selena Gómez, Zoe Saldaña and the trans actress from Madrid settled in Mexico Karla Sofía Gascón, who has revolutionized the Croisette with her double interpretation of the narco Manitas and his trans version Emilia Perez. “In Mexico, I am shocked by the femicides and the cases of missing persons, all the regions where you cannot go. The fall of democracy is unbearable for me”, said Audiard about a “poetic” film that he initially conceived as an opera and has ended up in a musical, one of the few genres that the artist of the western Los hermanos Sisters still I had not experienced.
All the actresses are formidable. Gomez plays the drug lord’s wife, a woman surrounded by luxury who has never questioned where the money comes from. Saldaña plays Rita, a lawyer tired of a measly salary and getting the bad guys out of prison that Manitas hires by force to find him the best surgeon in the world. The protagonist of Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar goes here practically without make-up and shows off in some demanding choreography. “There are injustices and corruption in all countries, but this has not taken away my respect and admiration for Mexican culture”, said the interpreter of Dominican origin, who highlighted the “creative freedom” that Audiard gave them in the shooting
Gascón was born in Madrid in 1972 with the name Carlos and has become popular in Mexico working in telenovelas. “At first Audiard only wanted me to play the part of Manitas, but in the end I managed to convince him that it could be Emilia as well. It’s a gift he gave me”, he said happily. During the gala screening, the film was given a standing ovation for nine minutes and the actresses could not hold back their tears.
And from corruption in Mexico to the lyrical fresco on the evolution of China since 2001 that Jia Zhang-Ke narrates in Caught by the tides. The Chinese director has seduced the festival by using more than a thousand hours of footage shot “in an improvised and experimental way” to tell a frustrated love story dry of words that at the same time works as an excuse to reflect on cinema, the passage of time and the profound changes that his country has experienced. Pure Jia Zhang-Ke.
