“You are going to see the best film in world cinema,” said Karla Sofía Gascón before the audience, who accompanied her with laughter, at the Mariano Matamoros Theater. The Madrid actress took the microphone to present Emilia Pereza film in which she stars—accompanied by her co-star and director, Adriana Paz and Jacques Audiard, respectively—and which opened the Morelia International Film Festival this Friday night. “It is a film that you will surely love. “You are the most important audience for us because you are the ones who have the power to evaluate the work you are going to see here,” he continued.
Hours before, during the press conference about the film, a couple of questions were emphasized about how Mexico would receive the film. Emilia Perezwhich was awarded the Best Actress award at Cannes for Gascón along with her co-stars, the Mexican Adriana Paz and the Americans Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña, tells the story of Rita, an overqualified and overexploited lawyer, who uses her talents to serve from a large firm more inclined to launder criminals than to do justice. But an unexpected exit door opens up for her: helping the leader of the Manitas cartel get out of the business and carry out the plan she has been secretly perfecting for years: finally becoming the woman she always dreamed of being.
Emilia Perezwhich also won the Jury Prize at the Croisette competition and was chosen by France to represent it in its race for the Oscar, does not yet have a confirmed date for its premiere in Mexico, however, it is expected to hit the theaters. at the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025.
In his most recent film, Audiard makes the leap from the black and white towers of the Parisian neighborhood to The Olympics (2021) and immerses itself in the ultraviolent world of Mexican drug traffickers and the crisis of the missing, with a Latin-Spanish cast and in a musical format. Despite how delicate it could be to address these issues in a country where drug trafficking leaves terrifying headlines every day and almost 100,000 people are missing, Audiard affirms that he does not seek to create controversy with his film.
“The film, basically, is a reconciliation. A reconciliation with things that are difficult to think and conceive. Can someone who has done evil all his life change? After having done evil, are you suddenly going to worship him? is it possible? That’s all. Mexico is a society that I love. There is an interesting social context. I am trying to find possible solutions to the contradictions. Solutions, but they come from an artist. These are not solutions from historians or sociologists,” Audiard clarifies.
Why do you take up this topic of the missing? “It is a topic that has obsessed me for a long time. Because I know that there are these 43 students (Ayotzinapa) who disappeared and perhaps you here in Mexico have all the disappeared more present. But in France, news about this problem suddenly appears and is reflected in an article or on TV, but after two days it has been forgotten. But I said ‘I’m not going to forget’. “I don’t forget,” said the director.
On the same point, Gascón stated: “Every person who comes out of this film ends up talking about Mexico and saying I want to be a better person. That is the best thing about this film, that Mexico remains a place where one can improve and be better. In the end this is not a documentary. Anyone who wants to go see documentaries goes to National Geographic and watches the animals. In the end we are making a film that is actually fiction. And you also have to take it a little for what it is. A film that is sung, danced and entertains, because, in the end, that is what a person looks for in a film.”
The Palme d’Or-winning director for Dheepan (2015) was inspired for his most recent work by a character called El Flaco, a drug trafficker who wanted to become a woman, and who appears briefly in the novel Ecouteby Boris Reason.
“I continued reading my novel and I realized that the character disappeared. Like the writer forgot about the character. I called him on the phone a few days later and said, what happened to this character? Are you going to develop it or something? He said ‘No, not at all.’ So I decided to take it up and develop it. He was a drug trafficker who wanted to become a woman. I came here to Mexico 42 years ago and fell in love with the country. So the story made sense here,” says Audiard during an interview with this medium.
The French director, who does not speak Spanish or English, took on the challenge of shooting the film in Spanish, just as he did without knowing the language with some of his other projects, such as the American film The Sisters Brothers (2018) or in the Tamil language in Dheepan (2015). “Spanish is a language that I love. It is music of poets and Camille (in charge of the songs in the film) told me that I had to make this film in Spanish. I’m making films in languages that I neither speak nor understand. The exchange of dialogues interests me less than the acting and the musicality,” adds Audiard.
That is why the accents are varied in the film. Saldaña’s character is originally from the Dominican Republic, but has lived in Veracruz for decades; El Manitas, played by Gascón – Spanish by birth – is a northerner from Mexico with his way of speaking neutralized and Gómez, of Latin parents, expresses himself in a mixture of Spanish, English and spanglish.
Audiard appeals to the genre of verismo opera, a genre that appeared at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, characterized by melodramatic plots, often violent, with characters taken from everyday life, and which has the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini as references. , among others. Although the film relies on shots and scenes filmed in the country for the setting, much of the details and recreation of the setting and details of Mexico were made in France.
“The film is not realistic in the strict sense. That’s why I filmed it in a studio so I could take the style to the maximum. We can have a work by Mozart, set in Italy and the singer can be a German woman. When it is done well and sung well, everything turns out very well. So I wanted the imperfections to be an integral part of everything,” explains the film’s screenwriter.
He says, for example, that he thought that Selena Gomez, an American with a Mexican father, spoke Spanish, “well no,” he admits smiling. “Sometimes those kinds of mistakes are made. I surrounded myself with very meticulous people to control this issue of accents. That was what helped me, because as a director, what interests me is more the acting. The musicality and that’s it”, he concludes.
