The full title of this article by Violaine Schütz is “Cannes 2024 : ce qu’il faut savoir sur Emilia Perez, premier choc du festival signé Jacques Audiard” [Cannes 2024: what you need to know about Emilia Perez, the first shock of the festival by Jacques Audiard]. She is referring to Emilia Perez, a new film (dubbed a “Dantesque queer musical”) directed by Jacques Audiard, starring Dominican actor Zoe Saldaña and Mexican American singer Selena Gomez. For the original article, go to Numéro.

Schütz writes “Jacques Audiard presented this [past] Saturday, May 18, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival a pharaonic musical comedy entitled Emilia Perez. Here’s what we know about this crazy film co-produced by Saint Laurent which features singer Selena Gomez and actress Zoe Saldana with crazy audacity.”

We weren’t necessarily expecting the director of De rouille et d’os (2012) with Marion Cotillard and Olympiades (2021) in this area, even if we are aware of the care he takes with the music in his feature films. But French director Jacques Audiard shot a Dantesque queer musical in Spanish, which earned him a standing ovation this Saturday, May 18, at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival [Festival de Cannes 2024]. We can already imagine a Palme d’Or for this fascinating odyssey among drug traffickers whose heroine is a transgender woman. And which looks more towards Pedro Almodóvar and Robert Rodriguez than French cinema.

Entitled Emilia Perez, the daring project co-produced by Saint Laurent (which results in spectacular and ultra-glamorous costumes) stars Zoe Saldana (Avatar), who has starred in four films that have exceeded two billion dollars at the box office, as a gifted lawyer and the transgender Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón (Rebelde) as the leader of a Mexican cartel who becomes a woman and who wants goodness around her. We also discover an ultra-sexy Selena Gomez, a criminal’s ex-wife, in love and tortured, very far from her image as a pop star. Each of one of them deserves an acting award for their wild performance combining singing, dancing, and raw emotion.

The pitch? “Overqualified and overexploited, Rita uses her talents as a lawyer in the service of a large firm more inclined to launder criminals than to serve justice. But an unexpected exit door opens to her: helping the cartel leader Manitas to retire from business and carry out the plan he has been secretly refining for years: to finally become the woman he always dreamed of being.” The underlying question? When Manitas has a sex change and becomes Emilia Perez, does it eradicate violence?

Jacques Audiard’s epic film is already one of the shocks of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A result in tune with its chaotic genesis. In January 2022, the magazine Télérama revealed, in a series of articles devoted to the gestation of Emilia Perez, that it would be “a slightly crazy adventure among Mexican drug traffickers.” The preparation of this feature film, which was initially supposed to be shot in Mexico, involved many twists and turns. Jacques Audiard had asked several musicians to write the songs for the film. When asked, Tom Waits, Chilly Gonzales (who composed a few samples) and Nick Cave declined the offer due to lack of time or fear of the amount of work. The director then turned to singer Camille who had impressed him on stage. Therefore, in the end, it is the French artist who is behind the music of the film initially conceived by Jacques Audiard as an opera in five acts. [. . .]

Excerpts translated by Ivette Romero. For full article (in French), see https://www.numero.com/fr/cinema/jacques-audiard-selena-gomez-comedie-musicale-zoe-saldana