'Emilia Perez': From Mexican cartel leader to Tel Aviv's operating table

Emilia Perez, a movie now playing in theaters around Israel, is a mess of a movie that wants to provide the fun of a musical telenovela with a trendy story about a drug cartel leader undergoing what used to be called a sex-change operation and is now referred to as gender-affirming surgery.

The style is Pedro Almodovar meets Baz Luhrmann, a movie where production design and visual flourishes hold your attention more than the plot or characters.

But for Israeli moviegoers, it has a unique plot turn that takes the main characters to Tel Aviv, which is shown as the destination the cartel leader chooses – out of many – for her operation.

A straight-shooting surgeon, Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir, a Ukrainian-born Israeli actor known to international audiences for his work  in Schindler’s List, Homeland, Away, and many other roles) gets the cartel leader, at first called Manitas (Karla Sofia Gascon), whose name is later changed to Emilia, to dig deep into his motivations for undergoing the procedure.

This movie, which had its world premiere in Cannes in 2024 (where it won the Jury Prize and Best Actress for its four leads), was likely filmed before the current war broke out, but it’s still interesting that it chose to portray this clearly identified Israeli doctor and his Tel Aviv clinic in a positive light. This was an unusual choice, and it’s worth noting that the director and co-screenwriter, Jacques Audiard (known for such films as A Prophet and Dheepan), has visited Israel to promote his work in the past.

Israeli touches in the film

While the Tel Aviv clinic scenes were filmed in a studio somewhere and not in Israel, this sequence has one genuine touch of Israeli atmosphere: a television at the clinic shows a clip of Shauli and Irena, the not-too-bright Israeli couple on the comedy-sketch show Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s version of Saturday Night Live. This scene got the biggest laugh of the entire movie from the audience I saw it with.

Although the film is billed as a musical comedy, there weren’t too many other laughs in an often visually arresting but mostly uninvolving story about Rita (Zoe Saldana, who was one of those blue creatures in Avatar), a lawyer who makes a living defending men of violence – early on, we see her getting a man who murdered his wife exonerated – and who is chosen by Manitas to discreetly arrange his surgery. Rita sends Manitas’s young American wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their children to Switzerland, saying they need to be there to be safe, and that Manitas has been killed.

Four years later, Rita meets the former cartel leader, now called Emilia, in London. Emilia, longing for her children, entices Rita to work for her again and bring Jessi and the children back to Mexico City, where she is hiding in plain sight as a woman. Jessi and the kids are none too happy about the move, having gotten used to the snowy luxury of the Swiss Alps, but they adapt, rather meekly accepting that Emilia is an aunt they have never met before.

Reunited with her children, Emilia blossoms and convinces Rita to hang around. Rita, who favored unflattering dress-for-success pantsuits in the early scenes, begins to dress in a more feminine way, wearing tiny silk halter tops that may remind you of the outfits suburban drug dealer Nancy Botwin wore on the series Weeds. 

Emilia, filled with the goodness that, in the movie’s telling, a successful gender-affirmation procedure can give, begins spending her time and her illegally amassed fortune to help locate the bodies of the approximately 100,000 Mexicans who have disappeared as the result of criminal violence, bringing closure to their families.

Emilia’s goodness is its own reward, but another follows, and she begins a romance with Epifania (Adriana Paz), a woman who is actually relieved to know that her abusive, missing husband is dead and can no longer harm her. 

At the same time, Jessi has moved on to Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez, who played Gianni Versace in American Crime Story), who wants to marry her and adopt her children. Emilia is not happy to learn that if the marriage takes place, she will lose her children again, and it turns out it’s not so easy to cross even a female former drug cartel leader.

The cast sings many songs, most of them with extremely literal lyrics about what is going on in the story, and performs several dance numbers. These will charm some, but for many moviegoers, they will become tiresome very quickly. Selena Gomez, known as a singer, as well as an actress, is entertaining when she sings, and there is one very affecting and visually effective lament by the families of the disappeared that really hits home, especially since we are still hoping for the return of the 101 hostages who remain captive in Gaza. But at other times, it seems that the songs and dances were thrown in to cover up the fact that the story has slowed down.

Although the four lead actresses, Saldana, Gomez, Gascon, and Paz, shared the Best Actress Award at Cannes, their work is only intermittently diverting. Gomez, as mentioned, can sing and is watchable as the spoiled but neglected wife, and Gascon and Paz are tasteful as the lovebirds. Saldana, though, is wan as the lawyer. When she sings and dances at a benefit given by rich hypocrites and supposedly stops the show, she seems like an incredibly earnest dance student rather than someone you can’t stop watching.

It's also worth noting that, except for the scenes with the Israeli doctor, the movie is in Spanish, with Hebrew titles. It’s rare for movies with mainstream actors to be in a language other than English, so that was a nice touch that added to the atmosphere.

Most of the film takes place in Mexico City, and the look is often reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, which was also set there, while the larger-than-life character of the reformed drug lord who is now a woman could have come straight out of an Almodovar movie.

The lively but crumbling setting shows a city steeped in violence and corruption, but also with a kind of raw beauty that shines through unexpectedly at times. It’s a shame that the spirit of this fascinating city didn’t come through more clearly amid the facile, virtue-signaling plot.