Emilia Pérez

The Exhumation of the Dead

or

Careful, There's No Railing

 

Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez (streaming forever on Netflix) seems purposely designed to make half of America's head explode. A musical with a trans protagonist who decides to quit their life as a drug kingpin and to become a woman. It's both a practical decision—he wants out of the drug trade, which guarantees a short life expectancy and he has a wife and kids that he adores—and a personal one—he wants a clean soul and to be true to himself, and his life in the macho world of the drug-trade just doesn't lend itself to his aspirations. He wants out, both of the way of the cartels and the way he must live his life as a merciless no-nonsense drug lord. 

Easier said than done.

 

Top-lining the film is Zoe Saldaña as attorney Rita Mora Castro, who we first see writing the closing argument for a case she does not believe in, but that ultimately is won, which leaves her conflicted about her profession. She receives an anonymous phone-call that puts it bluntly "Do you want to become rich? I have a proposition for you."

She's directed to a location 10 minutes away, where a car comes to pick her up, a hood is placed over her head, and she is taken to the stronghold of the Los Cabalos drug cartel, run by Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), the man who made the phone-call. His proposition is this: he wants to "disappear", fake his own death, and to have gender-affirming surgery so that he can live the rest of his life as a woman, with his family transported to Switzerland for their safety. Rita's job is to investigate, advocate, and see to the details to accomplish these goals.

She manages to make all the arrangements and walks away a very rich woman. Four years later at a swank dinner party she meets a woman named Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascónagain) and suddenly realizes...it's her client.

Audiard dramatizes the moment by shutting off every decorative light in the room, isolating the two women, who are the only people on Earth (well, besides the operating team) who know Emilia's past. For Rita, it's a moment of horror, because why would they suddenly cross paths just four years later—she fears for her life. But Emilia has other plans for Rita; as she accomplished things so well previously, she hires her to arrange to bring his wife (played by Selena Gomez) and his two children back to Mexico, to live with Emilia, who will masquerade as Manitas' sister. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot, apparently. If half the heads of America have exploded, almost all of them have in the story's setting of Mexico. Director Audiard is French and he filmed the movie in Paris. Only one of the principal actors is Mexican, and the script has been criticized for its confusion of Spanish and Mexican idioms as well as incorrect uses of pronouns, and for those "in the know" the accents are all over the place, needing to have them explained away in some expositional dialogue and for all this the movie is considered something of a pariah in Mexico. There are various controversies at the core of Emilia Pérez, but they've tended to eclipse some of the more problematic aspects to the film.

Before we get into that, the performances, however untechnical in terms of accents, are game. Gascón, a trans actor, is great in both roles she plays, and manages to garner empathy, while retaining an element that makes you suspect she could snap at any minute. Selena Gomez does well with her role as Manitas' wife, who realizes her place as a pawn in the relationship, but has just enough brio to make her own choices when given a long enough leash. But, the stand-out is Saldaña, who has done well for herself in well-established roles even if they're CGI enhanced, but here she gets to show her abilities as singer and dancer and she electrifies at it, while also going through some pretty complex emotions in transition scenes when the professional veneer she maintains drops.

Now, the downside...for a musical, the music isn't that great, for the most part taking the "Hamilton" approach of scatting between beats with lyrics that are better than the ones in, say, Annette, but far from memorable. The piece was first designed as an operetta, so the songs are just syncopated dialog revealing inner thoughts that transactional dialog is too plain to convey and the way they're presented is director-heavy music-video mode, where the camera does most of the dancing.

But, the part of the movie that irritates me is it's very old-fashioned in its way of dealing with the trans issues. To tell you why would reveal too much of the plot, but let's just say there's no such thing as redemption in Emilia Pérez. No second chances. It says, you may live a new life, but you will pay for the sins of the previous one...which, given the fact that the character tries to redeem herself with a charitable organization to provide answers to the families of victims of drug-cartels, is very Old Testament. You could argue that Manitas was a drug-lord, that he's destroyed so many lives she doesn't deserve to atone or to achieve atonement. Point taken. The crimes one then does are a forever-trap, despite secular ideas of reformation or religious ones of penance absolving them.

But, if that's so, it's akin (to the nth degree) to the faux-pas of "dead-naming" a trans person. Does blame transcend sexual identity? Does guilt? And if a person changes their life to atone for the sins of their past, to try to make it right for the survivors, is it atonement, or is it "too little too late." But, somebody just didn't have the chops to "go there." Emilia Pérez completely by-passes any deep-thought for melodrama and a conclusion for complex moral arguments right out of the Hays Code. It's annoying.

There's just enough clutziness to the whole enterprise, that you kind of wish there was a trans director (a Mexican trans director) behind it who might have been a bit more savvy, not only to the possibilities, but also the problems. Audiard has done some great work in the past (Une Prophete and Rust and Bone), but this one, he overreached and stylistic story-telling or satirical elements cannot camouflage the inherent issue of being a bit behind the curve when dealing with gender-politics. 

 

Emilia Perez is content to merely be outrageous. Well, they got the outrage. Just not the kind they were expecting.

The Big Short

Betting Against the House
or
Whose Default Is It, Anyway?

Michael Lewis is the darling of the non-fiction set, as Dan Brown is for fiction. His books have a great in-depth take on interesting subjects and change perspectives in fields that have already been well-tilled. Best-sellers get noticed by the movies and his books of "Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" and "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game" attracted Hollywood. The one book Lewis thought would never be turned into a movie was his "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine," because it was about economics and, more specifically, the bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting nuclear conflagration of the mortgage industry.

Now, the situation has been mined for movies before—Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and (more successfully) Margin Call—but, Lewis' take was a little different. It focused on the money-men who bet against the prevailing wisdom and saw the vast mortgage industry of buying mortgage after mortgage propping up the housing industry as a house of cards—there was no real money in it, merely paper, except at the tip of the iceberg. If things started to change, and if the industry didn't keep propping up its fantasy of the emperor having a nice outfit, the whole thing would collapse. All those houses had foundations of sand.

What an exciting movie that would make! Geeks looking at their computer-screens spotting trends. But, as unlikely as making a movie from Lewis' least cinematic book might be, it's even less likely that it could be made into a decent film by Adam McKay. McKay is most associated with movies starring Will Ferrell (Anchorman I and II, Step-Brothers, Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) and he created the comedy web-channel "Funny or Die!" with the comedian. Not the best record for doing a movie with this subject matter (and the distributor, Paramount, insisted that he do Anchorman II in order to off-set the predicted losses on The Big Short—it's own movie hedge-fund, a bit like life imitating art imitating life). But, sonuvagun, if McKay didn't pull the thing off, with a complex strategy that made the movie seem a lot less complex and entertaining to those wandering in off the streets looking for movie-fodder to kill a couple hours (and convince nervous movie execs that the movie, if done right, had precedent for attracting audiences).

McKay and his co-screenwriter Charles Randolph (who did something similar with the pharma-rom-com Love and Other Drugs) staged the whole thing as if it was a disconnected version of Ocean's 11 (one of the financiers of The Big Short is Plan B, Brad Pitt's production company), then top-loaded it with versatile performers who could do both drama and comedy—Steve Carell, Christian Bale, Pitt, Ryan Gosling—as point-men in the parallel stories of the only semi-affiliated co-conspirators.

Bale's Burry feigns indifference when launching his credit default scheme
before an unbelieving Goldman Sachs securities team.

Bale plays Michael Burry, an idiosyncratic investor who could never fit in to the corporate environment, but whose success has attracted a lot of big time money-men (Burry is the only real name in the screenplay and the real Burry isn't nearly as odd-ball as Bale's wonderful portrayal). After some careful analysis of the top-selling mortgage bonds, he sees that they are mostly financed by sub-prime loans that run the risk of defaulting if not backed up by actual cash. And it is here that McKay does something a little brilliant. He has his narrator Jared Vennett (Gosling) introduce the subject of sub-prime loans and what they are by saying "to explain them, here is Margot Robbie in a bubble-bath."

Cut to a soaking Robbie. Sipping champagne, she raunchily describes sub-prime loans, their origins and usefulness to growing a market, and just how volatile they are by saying "when you hear 'sub-prime loans,' think 'shit'" then blithely dismisses us with an "f-bomb" and we're back to the movie.

This is a little brilliant. McKay doesn't use this too much—chef-writer Anthony Bourdain goes over collateralized debt obligations and Selena Gomez expands on it by talking about synthetic CDO's—too much of it would ruin the surprise and, frankly, you've got to be careful about who you have do this stuff. McKay also bridges sequences with very artfully done montage sequences that give context and a smattering of fore-shadowing which up's the tension.

Ryan Gosling's Jared Vennett gets wind of the plan and becomes
its chief salesman and our narrator.

Part of the tension is provided by Carell, playing a fictional investor (although based on Steve Eisman), who is so dyspeptic and without filters that he can single-handedly ruin a group-therapy session. Bale's Burry comes up with the brilliant scheme (which amuses Goldman Sachs, confident in their pyramid housing scheme), but word gets to Venett who then sells the idea to Baum's company—although he's turned off by Venett's sales tactics and his own queasiness about the state of the business and the ethics of of profiting hugely on other people's miseries. Then there are the upstarts Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) who stumble onto the tactic and seek out financial guru Ben Rickert (Pitt) to be the financial Gandalf to their Hobbits and oversee the journey of valleys and hills to the pot of gold.

It is, of course, a risk. One that not everyone understands and is laughed at and mocked in the financial community high on its own profits and affluenza. Meanwhile, those invested in the hedge funds see the trends not abating and their risks increasing. Burry loses investors who think he's "gone rogue" and taking unnecessary risks with their money. All of the players see their investments in the hedge-fund not paying off and, in fact, losing money they could be spending on other things. They have bet large against the house and the house continues to win.

It all comes together in one of those "nobody-would-believe-this-if-you-wrote-it" moments where the protagonists get a front-row seat to seeing their dreams come true amidst the nightmares of others—one of the most telling is Shipley and Geller taking a tour of the abandoned offices and trading floors of multi-billion dollar companies they were barred from entering before. Along the way, factoids are dropped, hands wrung, and Rome burns...only to be bailed out by taxpayer money, the one seemingly inexhaustible resource. 

And the band plays on.

The Big Short might be called a black comedy...if anybody were laughing. For the characters, success only leads to contempt. There is no sense of triumph, only tragedy, and one is left as empty as a retirement account at the end of it. Still, for making a good film out of a sore subject, The Big Short is worth the investment.