Given the state of transphobia and xenophobia today, I’m not sure that having a trans lead in Emilia Pérez who starts out as a Mexican drug cartel boss is going to help matters any. It’s certainly an audacious choice, and the movie, directed by French auteur Jacques Audiard, is anything but conventional. Among other things, it’s a musical in Spanish with subtitles, featuring American stars Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez and streaming on Netflix.
The Spanish trans actor Karla Sofía Gascón (who comes from the same part of Madrid as Penélope Cruz) plays both Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, the reclusive cartel kingpin, and — after Manitas fakes his death and undergoes secret surgery in an Israeli hospital — the titular Emilia. Gascón is wonderful and authentic in both parts, exuding profound joy as Emilia being her true self as well as deep shame about her past. She fashions herself into a very public philanthropist and social activist, redressing some of the wrongs committed by the cartels, such as mass burials of “disappeared” victims. Her fantastic wealth, stashed in Swiss banks when she was a drug lord, makes all this possible, but its secret source is utterly corrupt.
Aiding Emilia in her transition is a lawyer, Rita, and Zoe Saldana brings grace and gravitas to the role. Rita is the Nick to Emilia’s Gatsby, the only one who knows her origins, and she trades an empty life as a lawyer for one as Emilia’s enabler. Selena Gomez plays Jessi, Manitas’s wife and mother of his children. When Emilia yearns to be with those children — she is their father — she rejoins Jessi, but not as her spouse, because Jessi believes Manitas to be dead. Needless to say, complications ensue.
The movie slips in and out of song casually and magically, with expressive lighting and dance. The lyrics are poetic, the singing breathy, and the music a pop mix of ethereal melodies. It’s like a noir update of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
This is not the first time Audiard has directed a film about identity transitions and the criminal underworld (cases in point: Dheepan; A Prophet; The Beat That My Heart Skipped). He’s a talent to be reckoned with, and what he’s accomplished here is impressive, though I’m not sure if the tragic elements of Emilia Peréz are as resonant as they ought to be. When it comes to the film’s 13 Oscar nominations — including those for adapted script, directing, actors Gascón and Saldana, two songs, and Best Picture — it’s hard to say what the Academy will dole out.
The main obstacle in Emilia Peréz’s path, as it stands now, is The Brutalist. Like Emilia Peréz, it’s an audacious film. More than three and a half hours long, with a built-in 15-minute intermission, The Brutalist tells the story of a Bauhaus-trained Hungarian Jewish architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), who survives Nazi concentration camps and arrives in Philadelphia in 1947 without his wife and daughter. He moves into a cousin’s furniture showroom, but that doesn’t work out, and before long he is living in a shelter.
Through odd coincidences (good and bad) in László’s life, the movie evolves into the epic story of the power of art and the need to create something transcendent. Religion and faith are just part of what’s behind László’s determination. He is kind, compassionate, and appreciative of people and nature, but a good deal is projected onto him by others, including an unfair share of abuse. His journey is relentless, and so is this inspiring film.
A commission to renovate a wealthy man’s library leads to another life-changing assignment from the same patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce): to build a combination chapel and community center atop a hill on his estate. László’s design is monumental. Using Brutalist cement slabs, he comes up with a vision of austere, sunlit spaces in cavernous rooms that are sunken underground and tower to the sky.
By this point, László’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and his taciturn grown daughter, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), have found their way out of Europe and join him in Pennsylvania. On the estate during construction, the Tóth family is subjected to the mercurial, bigoted, and tyrannical Van Burens. What happens there is by turns frustrating and degrading — it’s a crash course in the cruelty of the rich and powerful. The evil of repressed homosexuality also rises to the surface in a way that’s historically been used as shorthand to make a villain seem depraved (see: Z; The Silence of the Lambs). In this movie, however, the threat of sexual violence extends to all innocents, male and female.
The Brutalist is based partly on the real-life experiences of modernist architects, particularly Marcel Breuer, who designed and built homes in Wellfleet and, famously, the former Whitney Museum in Manhattan. But unlike László, Breuer left Nazi Germany early, was not a practicing Jew, and had a celebrated career in the States. With The Brutalist, director Brady Corbet and his screenwriting and life partner, Mona Fastvold, were drawing an analogy to the struggle of all artists, especially those making movies in a corporate world.
The low-budget epic they created is an unlikely triumph in Hollywood, but a triumph it is and not to be missed by any serious moviegoer — it’s currently screening in theaters. Brody, Jones, and Pearce are all nominated for Oscars, as well as Corbet for directing, Corbet and Fastvold for their original script, and Daniel Blumberg for his mesmerizing, dissonant score, a mix of atonal orchestral music and bebop. There are 10 nominations in all, including Best Picture, and all are well deserved.
This is a year in which art movies with limited audiences have risen to the top of the Oscar pack. Another example, now playing in local theaters, is Nickel Boys. Directed and co-written by RaMell Ross and based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, it follows the unfortunate fate of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a college-bound African-American teen from Tallahassee, Fla. in 1962 who ends up at Nickel Academy, a segregated reform school, after being picked up for hitching in a car that he didn’t know was stolen.
At Nickel, he bonds with another young man, Turner (Brandon Wilson). They witness corruption and torture and try to escape. They are trapped in a Jim Crow world in which young Black men live or die for reasons that are often beyond their control.
As straightforward as that story might seem, Nickel Boys is equally as audacious as Emilia Peréz or The Brutalist. It’s shot entirely in first person, the camera depicting only what Elwood, and later Turner, sees. There is no narration, and what happens is not always explicitly shown or told. You pick up on Elwood’s experience in poetic bits and pieces, starting from when he’s a little boy to his teenage years and then, looking back, as an adult. The actor playing him is seen only in reflections and through Turner’s eyes.
Nickel Boys is a bit of a puzzle — it unfolds like a free-associating Faulkner novel. But it’s a beautiful mosaic nonetheless and an absorbing and moving cinematic experience. Director Ross (who is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay along with the picture itself) is a documentary filmmaker making his fiction feature debut. He and Nickel Boys are long shots at the Oscars, but even their nominations are welcome.
