“The thing is,” Jacques Audiard tells me with a twinkle of mischief, “I don’t really like musicals.”
It’s an extraordinary admission for someone who has made an extraordinary musical. With two major awards at Cannes (one of which went to all four actresses in its ensemble), five European Film awards, including Best Film and Best Director, and 10 Golden Globe nominations (the most for any musical ever), Audiard’s extraordinary, Mexican musical thriller Emilia Pérez makes a comfortable claim to be our film of the year.
It’s France’s official entry for International Film at the Oscars next year, and some smart money is already suggesting it could take Best Film.
It’s a typically provocative statement from Audiard. He’s probably the coolest director in European cinema, creating bold and risky cinema since the mid-1990s, delivering films that are never dull or disappointing, but which wear their unpredictability and originality lightly. We’re talking prison movie A Prophet, Paris underworld thriller The Beat My Heart Skipped, Palme d’Or winner Dheepan, gritty romance Rust and Bone and others, featuring actors who have become major international names in French cinema, including Vincent Cassell, Marion Cotillard, Romain Duris and Tahar Rahim.
“It’s not as if I get up in the morning and think, ‘Oh I’m going to do something risky today’,” he says. “I just find the best form in which to tell my story. It doesn’t come instantly, but takes shape as I try to say something and the best way in which to say something intelligent and that will connect with an audience.”
And so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Emilia Pérez is a musical like no other, by turns funny, tragic and thrilling, a drama about a violent Mexican drug lord, Manitas, who has sex reassignment surgery and returns, unrecognisable, as a woman, Emilia, who founds a charity supporting widows of the thousands of “disappeared”.
There are songs about rhinoplasty and vaginoplasty; about corruption and murder; and a sweet one sung by a child, about how Mexican dads smell (of Coca-Cola, dogs, mescal and guacamole, apparently).
Audiard admits he’s perhaps exaggerating about musicals. What he doesn’t like is the French term for the genre: comédies musicales. “That irks me, because the best ones aren’t funny, they’re more tragedies, you know? The ones that have marked me are The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which is about the Algerian war; Cabaret, which is about the rise of Nazism; and Air.”
Air? I ask. Yes. Air, he says. I look blank. “You don’t know Air,” he says, a bit shocked and then pointing to his own bald pate. “Oh, Hair, well, why didn’t you say so…”
We laugh. “Yes, H-h-h-h-air. That’s about the Vietnam war,” he continues. “Musicals are great for telling historical stories and what I’m trying to do here with Emilia Pérez is something relevant about our times, something that will move people, so the story of transgender, the politics of the disappeared, violence in society, that felt to me like something very pertinent to what is happening in Latin America.”
Audiard shot all of the film in France, in a studio outside Paris. He brought over the contents of an entire street market and plonked them on a soundstage. “We needed to control the dance numbers and we couldn’t do that in a real street,” he says. “And, because there’s a level of artifice, that then dictates the film should be more heightened, more fairytale, more melodramatic.
“Anyway, I had begun to think of it more as an opera. One day, I re-read the script I’d written and to my great surprise, I saw I’d written a libretto to an opera, maybe something like Brecht in The Threepenny Opera.” (I’m amused to discover that in French this is called L’Opéra de Quat’Sous).
Zoe Saldaña is brilliant in the film, singing and dancing superbly, which might come as a great surprise to many who know her through the Guardians of the Galaxy and Avatar movies. She plays Rita, a Mexico city lawyer who is hired by the drug lord to arrange and oversee his transformation and disappearance.
Selena Gomez – one of the world’s most-followed people on Instagram and now familiar to those who didn’t follow her pop career from Only Murders In The Building – also stars as Jessi, the gangster’s rather confused and abandoned wife. Both she and Saldaña speak and sing in Spanish.
Audiard doesn’t speak Spanish. Nor did Camille, the French chanteuse from the band Nouvelle Vague who, with her partner, Clément Ducol, composed the songs and lyrics, learning Spanish to do so with a translator as she wrote. Two songs, El Mal and Mi Camino, have been nominated for Golden Globes.
“I do feel that cinema is the language,” he says. “That’s the raison d’être of cinema: identification. It’s to speak to people you don’t know, to find a path of connection to talk to people you’ve never met.
“That’s why I don’t call my films ‘risky’. I prefer ‘expressive’, perhaps, but yes I believe that we should be bowled over by a film, by the story and by discovering something, something you never knew, to witness the life of a human from elsewhere but with whom I can identify.
“And,” he adds triumphantly, “because in the act of identification there will be a point of view and that point of view is what makes the form of the film.”
He’s happy with that full circle examination. Audiard speaks quickly in French, the words tumbling out, the ideas finding a form. He’s been answering a lot of questions lately. Some wonder why he thinks he’s got the right to tell this story. He’s not trans, he’s not Mexican, not a woman, doesn’t speak Spanish, doesn’t sing or dance: “Like Norman Mailer says, tough guys don’t dance, right?”
But, more seriously, he admits the question of his suitability, his right to tell this story was not an issue that occurred to him. “It’s only now, when I see people saying they are upset or outraged about it that I think – oh, it could be a problem.
“But, the issue of trans identity, you know, I had Karla Sofía [the trans actress who plays the titular role] to ask and if she was offended, believe me, she would speak her mind.
“But, OK, such questions do make me examine myself. And I’ve made a few films not in my language [eg the comic western The Sisters Brothers, mainly Tamil-language Dheepan] and I’ve maybe leaned that way, to go beyond language and rely on pure cinema to tell the story. I’ve also told the story of a deaf woman [Read My Lips] and a disabled woman in a wheelchair, in Rust and Bone. Nobody said anything then, but I would hate to make a mistake, to not be authentic, that would be horrible.”
Audiard came to Emilia Pérez when he heard an episode about a cartel boss who underwent a sex change, just a small chapter in an audiobook of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute (Listen). He takes just a little spark from one work to create a whole other universe. But does he know what piques his interest, makes him follow a path down the rabbit hole?
“It must be that I’m attracted to a theme, to a story, for a reason, but I really don’t know why. It must be about changing your life, your appearance, overcoming the physical realm. If I look at my films, there’s a question of: can you really change your life, start a new one? That intrigues me.”
Does he know why? His father was the celebrated 1960s screenwriter Michel Audiard (writing for Henri Verneuil, Claude Miller, Jacques Deray and Jean Becker), so Jacques is hardly a rebel distancing himself from that world. Does he see each film as a new life, then?
“I like that idea,” he says, stroking his chin and crossing his legs. He’s a very physical, live-wire sort of presence, laughing and twisting in his seat and batting back my statements that aren’t actual questions. He needs space to think, but he doesn’t give himself much, always on to the next thought.
“I would say, yes, my films are different each time, but it doesn’t feel like that to me, I guess, because it’s me that’s making them. But each one is particular to the moment I make it – time passes, history changes, new problems arise in the world and in my life, so I try to respond to those elements and emotions, to tap into what I’m feeling.”
With Emilia Pérez he has struck a new kind of gold. The last time he was on the awards merry-go-round was when A Prophet was nominated for an Oscar in 2010. But that was just him doing the circuit alone.
Now, in a post-Parasite world, films “not in the English language” can break out and win in multiple categories. So this time, the schedule and the entourage, backed by the might of the Netflix machine, is, as he calls it, “énorme”.
He’s joined on these promo journeys and hand-shaking sessions (I’m talking to him after a Bafta voters’ screening in London and he’s off to Lucerne for the EFAs later, before flying to LA and New York for more screenings and Q&As) by several others from the team, including the lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón – the first trans woman ever to be nominated in the Best Actress category at the Globes – as well as Zoe Saldaña, and often the music team.
“You never know who will respond to your film,” he says. “That’s something that surprises me every time. So, I suppose my question each time is: ‘to whom should the film address itself? Who do I want to talk to, to move with this film?’ And you don’t know the answer until the film is on the screen and the people come. Or they don’t. Voilà, le risque du cinèma.”
THE OTHER FILMS OF THE YEAR
Conclave
Send up the white smoke to herald thrilling writing from Peter Straughan, top-notch acting from Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini; firm direction and interesting music elevate this adaptation of Robert Harris’s novel about a papal election. What would your Pope name be?
The Commandant’s Shadow
As gripping as it is horrifying, macabre and (just a bit) healing, Daniela Völker’s emotive documentary deals with generational trauma and brings together Auschwitz survivor Anita Lasker Wallfisch with the son of the camp’s former commander, Rudolph Höss.
Love Lies Bleeding
Lurid late 1980s small-town styling meets sweaty erotica in director Rose Glass’s super-distinctive and juicy bodybuilder thriller, where even Kristen Stewart is muscled out by Katy O’Brian’s startling debut.
Anora
Surprise Palme d’Or winner and glorious anti rom-com puts star Mikey Madison on the map as New York stripper, Ani, who lets herself believe in a fairytale, only to get tossed aside by Russian oligarch arrogance. Funny, sexy, poignant.
The Substance
Out-there visuals, brilliant makeup and prosthetic effects, and jaw-droppingly daring performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley just keep taking Coralie Forgeat’s feminist body horror to the next level.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Old-fashioned, sweeping and swashbuckling entertainment in this adaptation of Dumas’ 1844 novel of prison break and revenge, buoyed by Pierre Niney’s many faces, an alluring Anamaria Vartolomei and a wonderful Pierfrancesco Favino as the Abbe Faria.
La Chimera
Mysterious and eccentric Italian drama, the most beguiling film of the year is from Alice Rohrwacher and features Josh O’Connor, a troupe of antique Etruscan tomb raiders (word of the year: tombaroli) and a fading grand villa inhabited by Isabella Rossellini and her daughters.
Challengers
Anyone for tennis, Luca Guadagnino-style? Decent enough on-court action pales beside off-court mixed doubles sexual tension between Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist. A banging techno score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross gives it new balls.
Bird
Andrea Arnold veers into “magical social realism”, with Franz Rogowski’s bird-like figure befriending a lonely girl in the Kent badlands whose dad – played by a whirling, scootering Barry Keoghan – believes his fortune lies in a hallucinogenic toad.
Kneecap
Energy, political rage, wit and linguistic pride propelled this British Independent Film Awards winner, the dramatised story of a real-life Belfast, Irish-language rap band sticking it to, well, everyone… but mostly the British.
