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Join UsStar Cast: Karla Sofia Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz y Edgar Ramírez.
Director: Jacques Audiard
What’s Good: Emilia Pérez is a film, it is functional, it tells a story, and you will be able to follow it with no issues.
What’s Bad: The film fails at being a good drama, as there is no conflict between the characters. As a musical, as there are no good songs, and also as an entertaining film, it is just as boring.
Loo Break: You can take a break and go to the loo at any time, and you will not miss much at all.
Watch or Not?: This is a pass, even if you want to watch all the films nominated for Best Picture, there are better films on that list.
Language: English, and Spanish (with subtitles).
Available On: Theaters, VOD, and Netflix
Runtime: 132 Minutes.
User Rating:
Opening:
Emilia Pérez is a very strange case of a movie, it is for all intents and purposes, a piece of filmmaking that doesn’t really achieve anything other than controversy, thanks to its catchy premise and the fact that director Jacques Audiard and his team decided that the film should be a musical, without apparently understanding what the genre entails, and failing at creating one in the process, as well as a simple drama film.
Emilia Pérez Movie Review: Script Analysis
Watching Emilia Peréz through the perspective of this being a film with 13 nominations to the Academy Awards, might be a strange one as most critics reviewed the film in very different circumstances, before the controversy, and before all the backlash that the film has received since its release, and for a time I thought that most of the hate was unwarranted, and in way it is, as many people declare the film as one of the worst films in existence, which is a lie, because as a film is functional in the sense that it tells as a story, but not much else.
As the film begins and the story progresses it becomes apparent that the screenwriters didn’t do a good job, not only because the way the film set-ups its conflict is flawed on a foundational level, by making characters stupid or plain crazy, but also because the script tries to handle too many balls at the same time, and they all fall down to the ground in a terrifying way, there is just too many important themes, and too many depictions of situations being handled poorly.
The way the characters are portrait also screams shallowness, and because all the motivations and conflicts are basically just footnotes, it becomes really hard to have any sort of connection to what is happening on the screen, the film lacks focus, and the story is all over the place, while the characters expose their feelings openly, and without nuance, but there is not much to tell anyway, all culminating in an anticlimax that feels forced.
The less we say about the dialogue the better, as actors are being forced to speak lines in Spanish that sound as if they were translated using Google Translator, without having a Spanish-speaking person around to check if they sounded natural. This disregard for the language used in the film is just one example of the same lack of care for the other elements of the film.
Emilia Pérez Movie Review: Star Performance
Zoe Saldaña has received the most awards for the film, even after the entire awards campaign fell down after Gascón old tweet surfaced, and it makes sense because, if there is anything “solid” about the film is Saldaña, as she plays a sort of witness to the entire situation that the film depicts, but the writing never allows her to be a proper character, so even if she wins her Oscar it will feel weird, because she has delivered better performances in the past.
Gascón does it well, but there is nothing here that screams excellence, which is what you’re looking for in a performance that is nominated for the Academy Awards. It is clear that most of the nominations were made for political reasons, which is a shame. Selena Gomez receives the short end of the stick, with a terrible performance that is only made worse by having her speak Spanish, a language she is definitely not fluent in.
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Emilia Pérez Movie Review: Direction, Music
As a director Audiard as some very good films under his belt, which is why Emilia Peréz feels like a big mistake, every single decision made in the film, from cinematography to music, just doesn’t fit or help the film to feel relevant or outstanding, everything is done half-baked, or simply without any sense for quality. For example, every single song and musical number is just laughably bad, and it is sad for the dancers that appear in the background or the actors having to say lyrics that don’t push the story forward or reveal anything about our characters.
On a visual level, the film is quite rudimentary, and at times it feels like Audiard is trying to imitate the look of the Latin-American Soap Opera, which already makes everything feel cheap, and as if every scene was done on the first take. There is no exploration of characters, and all scenes feel disconnected for one another, nothing flows naturally, and it is very noticeable. The fact that Emilia Pérez is nominated besides Dune: Part 2 and Nosferatu in the Best Cinematography category feels completely wrong.
Emilia Pérez Movie Review: The Last Word
Emilia Pérez might not be one of the worst films in history as some people say, but it is definitely one of the worst nominees ever in the history of the Academy Awards. It is offensive, and lazy, and it tries to do too many things, achieving basically nothing in the process. The performances are very weak, and only Saldaña comes across as a professional actress, while the technical achievements of the film are incredibly basic, making it an easy non-recommendation.
Emilia Pérez Trailer
Emilia Pérez released on 27th February 2025.
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