No, there is no imperial conspiracy against the Third World. Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light lost the Critics Choice award to Emilia Perez for the very simple reason that it was a lesser film.
Dare I say that? For months now, we have been spotlighting Ms Kapadia’s film as though it was the best thing to happen to cinema since Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. Sorry, that was an overreaction. I have seen Ray’s Pather Panchali innumerable times, and each time, I came away with a new thrill.
I saw All We Imagine as Light a second time and could barely sit through it. While the salient characters’ profound forlornness is palpable—the nurses need some serious healing—the second overture in the Maharashtrian village lacks space, elegance, and even coherence.
French auteur Jacques Audiard’s new work Emilia Perez is a beast hard to tame. It is a sprawling wonderland of genre mixes where a musical coalesces cheekily with a crime thriller. Let’s say it combines Al Capone with Andrew Lloyd Webber and comes up with a brackish, heady brew that is hard to ignore.
My bait for this movie date was the director’s 2015 film Dheepam, a moving, fiercely original film about three Tamil refugees who fled Sri Lanka’s civil war to France. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Emilia Perez is even more audacious. It stars the trans-actor Karla Sofía Gascón as a man who hires a lawyer in Mexico, Rita Castro( Zoe Saldaña), to facilitate her gender-correction operation. Gascon won the Best Actress award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, and rightly so. Her performance is transfixing. She portrays the transition from male to female so convincingly that I thought the early portion as a man was played by some other (male) actor. But no. That’s the same actor taking us on the protagonist Emilia’s turbulent journey from one gender to the other with devastating conviction and poignancy.
“Poignancy,” one would think, would have no place in this fabulous modern fable of crime, music, and gender-crossing afterlife. Thanks to the lead actor, the rough, jagged edges of the brutal yet frail tale are done away with. What we are left with is the throbbing pain of a man who crosses over but cannot leave his baggage behind.
The execution of the plot does not rely on basic rules of plausibility. The entire process of transporting the protagonist from one life to another is undertaken in an unmistakably theatrical tone. The songs are particularly impedimentary. They pop up unannounced in the midst of the human complexities, wrestling a place for themselves willy-nilly.
I am not sure why the director has chosen to tease songs and dances into the drama. Broadway meets melodrama in a clasp that is not quite comfortable. The songs’ placement is also problematic: when Rita visits the doctor for her client’s gender-correction surgery, the doctor (Mark Ivanir) starts singing his misgivings rather than stating them.
In fact, the songs are purposely placed in awkward positions as if to remind us that life’s monstrous unpredictability needs a prop to make it bearable.
The crossover sections when the gangster Manitas transforms into Emilia are handled with care, as are the political overtones of a Mexico on the brink that are insinuated into the story, sometimes with savagely humorous results.
When a woman is informed that her “missing” husband has been found, she shows up to claim him with a knife to kill him and is much relieved when told he is dead. The laughs are not unwelcome in this sobering drama of finding the self in a world of unsolvable riddles.
