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.

A Complete Unknown (2024)

How Does It Feeeeeeeeeel?
or

The Freewheelin' (Inscrutable) Bob Dylan

 

"Seven simple rules of going into hiding: one, never trust a cop in a raincoat. Two, beware of enthusiasm and of love, both are temporary and quick to sway. Three, if asked if you care about the world's problems, look deep into the eyes of he who asks, he will never ask you again. Four, never give your real name. Five, if ever asked to look at yourself, don't. Six, never do anything the person standing in front of you cannot understand. And finally, seven, never create anything--it will be misinterpreted, it will chain you and follow you for the rest of your life."

Bob Dylan

 

Musicians performing on-stage use something called "foldback speakers" so that they can hear themselves accurately against the wash of sound coming from auditorium reverberation or the cacophony of crowd noise fighting against them—modern musicians use ear-buds to have their music pumped backed to them without any deleterious feed-back from similar music sources competing. 

 

That little bit of insider trivia is what I was thinking about walking out of A Complete Unknown, the new bio-pic of a slice of Bob Dylan's life as he was becoming more known and making a name (and history) for himself prowling around the Greenwich Village clubs, riding a burgeoning folk-music wave and expanding the subject matter of the genre like his heroes, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger into advocacy-folk or what would become known as "protest songs," which formed the soundtrack of the youth movement of the early 1960's.

 

Dylan has been mixed up with movies before—the documentary Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back, various music videos, he wrote the music for and played in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote and starred in Masked and Anonymous, and Renaldo and Clara, and although not mentioned by name is seen through a prism of stories and interpreters in I'm Not There.

Well, this one has his seal of approval, sticks to one actor as Dylan, and covers January 24, 1961 to July 25, 1965 (when Dylan first arrived in New York City at the age of 19 to his controversial performance set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival). And it does a pretty good job of clearing away all the myths about Bob Dylan, his absences from the public eye (hard to believe these days, he's even done commercials), his changing personas more than Madonna or Bono, and just concentrates on that initial section where he became a performer, then The Brand New Thing, then The Highly Exploitable Thing, to The Voice of His Generation, all the while navigating the rigors of performing, the inanities of being a product, and the desire to start breaking things and doing something fresh.

Frankly, that's enough. It was never his mission to be understood, and the movie never tries to psychoanalyze or explain his actions, but merely the context into which he arrived and the way things changed once he started performing. He came in with talent and a poet's way of putting thoughts into words in a way no one had ever done before, inspired by folk music and its tendency towards metaphor. 

That is immediately recognized by practitioners of the art—Pete Seeger (Edward Norton, wonderfully essaying the man as appeaser rather than rebel) and a hospitalized-by-Huntington's Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy, in a non-verbal performance), and he is promoted, signed by a label (Dan Fogler plays Columbia A & R guy Albert Grossman), and starts playing bigger venues, all the while already established folkies like Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) start interpreting his material for the mainstream. The maxim is "it's the singer, not the song" but Dylan's "voice" (as far as his writing) was so distinct, he bobbed up through the commercialization as the Genuine Article quickly and, with his ungussied-up vocal stylings, bereft of soothing harmonies and homogenizing orchestrations.

So...back to that foldback speaker: Imagine you're putting yourself out there, performance after performance, and you're leading the field. Then, you start hearing yourself over and over again and not necessarily your voice. People are singing your songs, and then imitating your songs—Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" begets your "Blowin' In The Wind" and then that begets Phil Ochs' "There But For Fortune"—or imitating your composing-process, and then parroting and parodying your songs and then you're suddenly surrounded by the newest versions of "you" while (as movie-Dylan gripes) "you just want me singing 'Blowin' In The Wind' solo for the rest of my life." It's stifling. It's maddening. It makes you want a change.

But, that's not what your label wants. It's not what your manager wants. It's not what your fans want. They want the rebellion and the "new" sound to be what they're comfortable with...or what they're making money with. You want to create. They want to cash in. Or get their comforting nostalgia. No one gets it.

But it gets creepy. There's a scene in Don't Look Back where Dylan is talking to a fan and the exchange is this:

Fan: I just don't like any of the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" stuff. 

Bob Dylan: Oh, you're that kind - I understand, right now. 

Fan: It's not you. It doesn't sound like you at all! 

Bob Dylan: But, my friends, my friends were playing with me on that song. You know, I have to give some work to my friends too. I mean, you don't mind that, right? Huh? You don't mind them playing with me if they play the guitar and drums and all that stuff, right?

Fan: It just doesn't sound like you at all. It sounds like you're having a good ole laugh. 

Bob Dylan: Well, don't you like to have a good ole laugh once in awhile? Isn't that all right with you?

 

"That's not you." How the "homesick blues" does he know? Because he attended a concert? Because he bought himself a record? It's no wonder that at one point Dylan just blurted "Just because you like my stuff doesn't mean I owe you anything." See it as ingratitude if you must or see it as not "playing the game" but "you gotta do you" because "you" is what got you there in the first place. All artists go through this. Some have even rebelled. Some have got away with it. Some have not. Some have walked the tight-rope of practicality where you're either an "artist" or you pay the bills (you know...like we non-artists do).

A Complete Unknown is wonderful in every way for putting you not in Dylan's head but in his head-space. And if the man is still an enigma after you see it, you can, at least, understand why. If I have anything negative to say about it, it's that Ricky Nelson said the same thing in just over three minutes.* That's efficient.

Now, I've gotta pay the bills, do what's expected of me: how is Chalamet? Spot on. Pretty amazing, actually, but I've never ever been disappointed by a Chalamet performance. Of course, he's prettier than Dylan, but, like Joaquin Phoenix did with Johnny Cash in director Mangold's previous music bio-pic I Walk the Line, he suggests Dylan rather than does a full-on imitation. He has a less-is-more approach which is entirely appropriate for the subject, but there's a nice touch that he brings to his Dylan which is lovely—a defiant, almost predatory stare, observing, analyzing, like a biding-his-time hawk. And, considering his vocal talents in Wonka, of course he can do a dead-on imitation of Dylan's singing style. You have to listen very closely to tell the difference between Chalamet's versions of Dylan's songs and the memories of the real deal.

I mean, the real "real deal."

"I'm not angry. I'm delightful."

Bob Dylan 

*

 

Hairspray (2007)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2007) I'm not big on musicals. Rarely are they better than their source material and the songs, more often than not, are filler with "Moon/June" lyrics that fail to impress. My idea of clever musicals are "Guys and Dolls" and "The Music Man" that carry their music fantasies with a little bit of arrogant panache, daring you to not take it as seriously as regular dialog. My expectations of musicals are pretty low (which is good, I think, as it gves them more of a chance), and my expectations of "Hairspray"—despite rave reviews of the stage version that debuted *huzzah* in Seattle—were quite low. You just knew that a musical of "Hairspray" wouldn't be as edgy as the John Waters original. It was going to have to be neutered to be made "safe."

Plus, it has John Travolta in it. I can't remember a John Travolta* movie where I was impressed with him. I was probably going in with the wrong attitude.

Because I enjoyed the Hell out of it. Word is that the movie version is a bit more stream-lined and a lot less camp than its stage-version. That may have helped, because "Hairspray" (the musical; the movie) is joyously anarchic, popping balloons gleefully as it goes—maybe laying it on a bit thick, as it goes—but as an expression of the freeing power of rock n' roll, few movies can top it. Especially the serious ones.

The year: 1962, pre-Kennedy assassination (it would have to be) in segregated Baltimore. For Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky—this girl needs to work more), life is surviving school in time to get home to watch "The Corny Collins Show" (with James Marsden, going full-wattage cheese), a dance party television show, featuring her dancing dreamboat Link Larkin (Zac Efron, not quite legitimizing the hysteria over him). Her dreams come true when one of the teen-dancers takes a leave of absence ("Nine months," she doesn't need to explain) giving Tracy and her blond twig girlfriend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes) a chance to audition. She has many obstacles: station owner Velma von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer, whom my wife described as "voluptuously hideous"—yes, indeed**), and her parents, Wilbur and Edna Turnblad (Christopher Walken and John Travolta).

Now, here I must stop. Christopher Walken rarely fails to please, but it's a too-rare treat to see him sing-and-dance, which he obviously loves. And Travolta, in drag and dressed in a fat suit with a raspy ovah-the-"twop" Maryland accent?

He's great. Except for his accent slipping during the songs, he's damned near pitch-perfect, doing dance moves weighed down in prosthetics (and in high-heels no less), and providing a sympathetic life-force to the proceedings. Everybody's terrific in it, including old guys Paul Dooley and Jerry Stiller (who played Tracy's dad in Waters' original). 

Then there's Queen Latifah, who plays the "fill-in" host on Corny Collins' once-a-month "Negro Day"—the black dancers cordoned off from the white dancers by a rope partition—proving once again she is the Rock n' Roll Renaissance woman, who can rise above bad material, and soars with the good.

But it'd all be naught if not for the songs (well-staged with choreography-friendly directing by Shankman that recalls past movie musicals) by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman. Shaiman's ear for 60's rock styles is flawless and the words by Wittman and Shaiman are clever and sassy and occasionally downright rude.

Original "Hairspray" auteur John Waters even shows up (in an early cameo as a flasher) and there are quick appearances by the director, Shaiman and Stillman and the original's star Ricki Lake. Word is that he's working on a screenplay for a sequel.*** If the product is half as fun as this singing step-child of his work, it will be a must-see.

* Since writing this, I remember I thought he did an extraordinary job of carrying Nicolas Cage's tic's in Face/Off.

** Pfeiffer has a torchy song—"Miss Baltimore Crabs"—that she vamps though in such high-style that it catches one off-guard...until one remembers "Oh yeah...Susie Diamond."

 

 

*** Hairspray 2: White Lipstick was in the planning stages with a screenplay written by Waters, and preliminary cast mentioned , but in the words of director Adam Shankman "it got scrapped" and added “It's ok, I was so happy with the first one; let's leave well enough alone.”

Wicked (Part 1)

Galindafied and Elphabatized
or

Defying Gravitas ("Well, That's a Little Perky...")

 

I didn't know from "Wicked". Never saw the show. Never read the book. The only thing I knew was from YouTube videos watching Idina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth doing songs from the show. That doesn't give you any sense of what the show is and what the story is about. You can glean that it's a "ret-con" origin story for the Wicked Witch of the West (played by Margaret Hamilton in the version of The Wizard of Oz that everybody knows and loves).

 

It's a trend. As I wrote in my review of Maleficent: "I don't mind when a villain gets his just desserts, but I don't want to "feel for" them when they receive it. I want no sympathy for villainy, no matter the lawyering of its arguments. The fact is I don't care why the Grinch stole Christmas, why the Wicked Witches terrorize Oz, or why Booth shot Lincoln or Oswald shot Kennedy. I don't care why the creep killed those people at USC. Some things cannot be explained away, or understood for their motivations. God help me when I do understand the terrible actions in this world. They are acts of evil, un-pure and simple."

"It is a tragedy that we even have the opportunity to ponder them at all."

 

"Making Maleficent sympathetic diminishes us...and diminishes her."

I haven't changed much in my thinking. Other than to suppose that argument is a little heavy for something like "Wicked". And it does a good job of making the black-and-white/good-and-evil extremes of L. Frank Baum's stories more complex and nuanced. (So, calm down, you musical-theater students! I'm just pondering here and I wouldn't do that if "Wicked" didn't have some significance). I felt the need to see it, anyway, because, after seeing all the corporate tie-ins involved with the thing ubiquitously on television commercials, I began to think that not seeing it might make the economy collapse. I had to do my part.

So, here's John M. Chu's version of Wicked (Part 1 it should be emphasized, this part ends right at the intermission of the play, with the rest of it to be released next year), and it takes full advantage of green-screens and movie-magic (just as the 1939 The Wizard of Oz made the most of the special effects technology of its day*) and is choreographed, production-designed, and cinematographed within an inch of its stage-life, except now taking advantage of the new camera technologies that give you a flying-monkey's perspective of Ozian landscapes.

The film begins in media res of events of The Wizard of Oz with the camera gliding over the homicide scene of the Wicked Witch of the West's watery demise, with its sodden floor, the empty robes and the unadorned hat the only signs of what had gone before. We're whisked—past the figures of Dorothy and her companions making their way to the Emerald City to present the witch's broom to the Great and Powerful Oz—to Munchkinland where the decidedly un-heighth-challenged citizens celebrate the death of the one remaining bad witch when Glinda the good witch (Ariana Grande) confirms that, indeed, the Wicked Witch of the West has been liquidated, and her muted reaction to the news is muted. She reveals that she knew the Wicked Witch and reveals that, yes, they were even friends.

She recalls that the Witch (Cynthia Erivo) was named Elphaba Thropp—conceived as a result of an affair between the Munchkinland Mayor's wife and a traveling salesman and disowned by the Mayor when she is born with green skin-tones, making her an outcast. They have a second child, Nessarose (Marissa Bode), who is born paraplegic and so the parents' affection and care gravitate to her with Elphaba seen as merely a caretaker. When the Mayor has Nessarose enrolled at Shiz University, Elphaba accompanies her, but when things get a little dire, she displays unbridled magical powers that attract the attention of Shiz's Dean of Sorcery Studies, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh). She is enrolled over the Mayor's protestations with Morrible becoming her private tutor and is roomed with Galinda Upland (Grande), the perpetually bubbly social queen of Shiz.

They do not get along. Galinda sees Elphaba as a drag and Elphaba sees Galinda as...typical. But, the two do see moments of value in the other, especially when Elphaba begins to stick up for animal rights at Shiz—talking animals being the legacy instructors at the University. But, the animal professors are being replaced by biped instructors by order of the Wizard of Oz (Jeff Goldblum) and that they be prohibited from talking, instructionally or otherwise, and to the ostracized Elphaba that feels more than specist, it feels authoritarian and she's had enough of that in her personal life, thank you. It's not nearly bad or merely bad, but really and sincerely bad.

That's the gist—The growing trust between Galinda and Elphaba and the growing distrust between Elphaba and the Wizard, and what to do about it. Oh, there's boyfriends, too (Jonathan Bailey and Ethan Slater) just to complicate things, and lots and lots of ancillary characters on the fringes because they have to have dancers. It's a musical, after all.

I'm hot-or-cold with musicals. The form always makes me suspicious, even while understanding that breaking into song is a better expression of feeling than "talking it out." But, those songs and those feelings have to be really strong to earn their place in the narrative. Anything less and you're wasting story-telling time and just harmonizing-in-place. Here, that number is "Dancing Through Life" which is just a pace-killer (although it serves as the intro piece to Prince Heartthrob, Fiyero). The thing just goes on forever and had me thinking of P.L.Travers' critique of Disney films with their "cavorting, twinkling, and prancing to a happy ending like a kamikaze." Fortunately, that's the only point where, if I had a watch, I'd be checking it. The rest of the film sails right on by with something always entering frame to goggle at or enjoy a vocal performance.

And let's face it, the show is a bit of a two-hander between the characters of Elphaba and Galinda/Glinda and that's where Wicked is at its best. Grande is a natural for Glinda although the performance is leavened somewhat by the introduction of a cool aloofness that helps solve the problem of Glinda perky-power-housing through the show to the detriment of the more austere Elphaba character. The movie transfers some of that energy to the chorus of characters surrounding the two and it allows you to really appreciate one thing.

And that's the concentrated subtlety of Cynthias Erivo's performance. While the rest of the movie is "twinkling and cavorting" she earns every slight tilt of the head, wry pull of the mouth, and doesn't waste anything. And she acts through her songs, so even through context, you know exactly what she's singing about—from everybody else, a lot of the lyrics get lost in the jumble. And when she tornadoes through a power-ballad, it shakes the theater-speakers and pummels the heart-strings. I dropped a tear or two during that "Defying Gravity" finale, and that's probably a little threatening to the character.

 

But, it made me want to see Part 2—and not just for the sake of the economy. I have to admit, it did cast a spell.

* The book, of course, didn't have to hew to any visual conception. The stage-musical leaned heavily into the 1939 movie version of things.