Oscar frontrunner Emilia Pérez is a reductive take on the trans experience – starring a miscast Selena Gomez

Karla Sofía Gascón could make history as the first openly transgender Best Actress Oscar nominee – but you can’t help but wish this Netflix musical-crime-drama was better than it is

Emilia Pérez commands attention. It’s a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars, a florid Spanish-language musical by French auteur Jacques Audiard in which a besuited Zoe Saldaña, spot lit, charges around a charity dinner. She crawls over tables, straddles the monied elite and pulls at their neckties. It’s a fantasy sequence, an expression of her revulsion towards the hypocrisy in the room. The diners are there to honour the missing and murdered of Mexico, the victims of the cartels, all while pocketing bribes and offering favours to those responsible. “All these people talk,” she hisses. “Now they’re going to pay.”

Audiard tends towards that kind of direct, intense sentiment in his films – whether it’s the sudden shocks of violence that erupt in the French prison of A Prophet (2009), or Marion Cotillard as a whale trainer recovering from a double leg amputation in Rust and Bone (2012), retracing the movements of her show routine set to Katy Perry’s “Firework”. But Audiard’s efforts don’t always pay off, and in Emilia Pérez they come across as impassioned but featherweight.

The director, here also credited as sole writer for the first time, has borrowed a briefly mentioned character from Boris Razon’s novel Écoute, a trans drug dealer, and expanded her story. She’s played by Spanish telenovela star Karla Sofía Gascón, whose performance was celebrated at Cannes this year, where she became the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at the film festival.

Emilia summons lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Saldaña) in order to secure her aid in arranging a series of gender-affirming surgeries, and to then ferry her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children – all clueless about her transition – to another country. Jessi is to be told her husband is dead. Four years later, Rita and Emilia’s paths cross once more. Emilia wants her children back. She also wants to build an NGO to support the missing persons cases she may herself have been responsible for, and seeks absolution in the arms of one of the victim’s wives, Epifanía (Adriana Paz).

But Audiard seems disinterested in what the trans experience might materially be like. Instead, he renders Emilia and her pre-transition self as two entirely different, disconnected people, as if he only sees his trans lead as a metaphor, an opportunity to explore his own thoughts on rebirth and second chances. There’s a slight whiff of reductive gender essentialism here: the notion that womanhood is purity manifest, that Lady Macbeth was always clear of her damned spots.

Rita, whose career has been spent defending men who murder women, is also on a crusade for absolution. But Emilia Pérez’s conclusions on the matter are vague and muddled, buried in melodrama, and the film seems oddly incurious about the way these women continue to live surrounded by the wealth their own immorality created. Gascón and Saldaña attack their respective roles with vigour and dedication. Gomez, meanwhile, seems a touch miscast, or at least robbed of the opportunity to show off the easy, deadpan charisma that makes her so watchable on television’s Only Murders in the Building.

Oscar favourites: Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña in ‘Emilia Pérez’ (Netflix)

Pulsating, loose-limbed choreography is provided by Damien Jalet, who achieved the uncanny more effectively in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. Songwriters Camille Dalmais and Clément Ducol’s frequent use of speak-singing is reminiscent of the Sparks-penned soundtrack to Annette (2021), but there’s none of that film’s sense of musical cohesion. The real problem with Emilia Pérez is a lack of connection. Music becomes just music. Words become just words.

Dir: Jacques Audiard. Starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez, Mark Ivanir. Cert 15, 132 mins.

‘Emilia Pérez’ is streaming on Netflix