The musical as a pure genre is in questionbut in recent times musical films have not stopped being made on generic bases and the most diverse plot approaches, surprising for the viewer: the psychological thriller ‘Joker: Folie à deux’, the drama about the acceptance of death ‘Dust they will be ‘ and the dystopian story ‘The end’, about to be released. ‘Emilia Pérez’ participates in this reborn trendsince it is the story of a violent drug trafficker who transitions into a woman and, in addition, directs an organization to repair historical memory in Mexico, all of it filled with choreography and songs in which, as always happens in the musical, the characters express their deepest feelings by singing instead of speaking.
Manitas del Monte, the head of a Mexican cartel, hires an underrated lawyer, Rita Moro Castro, to help him in his transition and maintain his accounts. The character is reborn as Emilia Pérez. There is an important detail: Manitas already felt like a woman as a child, so he did not change his identity and sex to mislead his competitors and the justice system, or he did not do it just for that reason. But the past always comes back, one way or another, and here it is through his former wife, who believes him dead, and their children. Jacques Audiardwho likes to flirt with different genres and tones, always challenging, conceives a rather crazy story which he covers with a patina of tragic sobriety. The musical numbers are inserted as if they were a fantasy (the sequence in Bangkok, for example) that moves away from harsh reality to constantly return to it.
