Emilia Pérez

For those of you keeping score at home, Emilia Pérez is the third, and last of the movies that I thought was centered around a transgender character, and this one was the winner.  Much to my surprise, the movie also happens to be the most "typical" Hollywood movie, in that it doesn't come across as art-housey as the other contenders for Best Picture this year.  At its core, Emilia Pérez is a standard 3-act movie about a Mexican drug lord who hires an American lawyer to help him change his identity, and start a new life.    As the movie progresses, it is revealed that the drug lord's main motivation for changing is that he's always felt like he's in the wrong body, and living the wrong life, and wants to become a woman who isn't a drug lord.  Of course, past iterations of this story, such as Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven played the fish-out-of-water angle more, and dealt less with a series of procedures with "plasty" in the name.  That being said, I liked that the director, Jacques Audiard didn't get preachy with the movie, rather he told an interesting story with unique characters.  At its most basic, isn't that why we watch movies?  I haven't mentioned it yet, but there were also musical elements to the film, i.e. the characters would sporadically start singing from time to time, as the mood struck them.  As I write this, I know that some of you are thinking that I've completely lost it, since I previously said that this wasn't an "art-housey" movie.  In my defense, overall I really liked the use of singing as a technique to convey the characters' thoughts and emotions, and the transitions between speaking parts and singing were well done.  I didn't like the movie for a number of reasons, but the one that I'll mention here is the ending; as with the recently reviewed I'm Still Here, I sense that the filmmakers didn't have an exit plan; the problem with Emilia Pérez is that they just ended the movie without taking the time to create a satisfying conclusion.