Jacques Audiard’s new film “Emilia Pérez”, which was recently selected as the French submission to Best International Film Oscar, is a mixed musical which sometimes works with striking emotional intensity. Although it does not wholly work as well as intended, there are also a lot of good elements to be admired and appreciated, and that may be enough for you to overlook a number of glaring flaws here and there in the film.

The story, which is mainly set in Mexico City, begins with the bold introduction of one of its several main characters. Although she is quite a competent and resourceful lawyer, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) does not get much appreciation from many others in her law firm, and the opening musical scene dramatically expresses her growing frustration with not only her job but also the increasing social injustice around her.

And then there comes a very unexpected offer to Rita on one day. After suddenly being taken to somewhere by several members of a very powerful local criminal organization, Rita comes to have a private meeting with its boss, who wants her to do some extremely clandestine job on his behalf. After many years of personal conflict on his sexual identity, this dude decides to begin a new life as a woman, and he requests Rita to handle the whole transformation process of his without any problem for him or his wife and their two kids.

Because this offer of his is surely the one she cannot possibly refuse, Rita agrees to do the job for him, though she soon comes to see how ruthless and demanding her secret client can be. In the end, she finds a doctor who will perform a gender transition surgery on her client without asking too much about him, and then her client subsequently takes the final step for becoming a woman and then having a new life far away from his criminal life.

Four years after he “died”, Rita comes across her client again, who looks quite different compared to when they met each other for the first time. Now he becomes a wealthy Mexican lady named Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), and she wants Rita to handle the matter involved with the wife and the kids in Emilia’s former life. Although Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her two kids have been living happily and comfortably in Europe, Emilia wants to bring them back to Mexico City, and Rita reluctantly agrees to work again for her client.

What follows next is a morbid melodramatic circumstance reminiscent of many works of Pedro Almodóvar. Presenting herself as some distant cousin of Jessi’s husband, Emilia gets herself more involved with Jessi and their two kids, and there is a little amusing musical moment between Emilia and one of their two kids, who instinctively senses something common between “Aunt Emilia” and her former male self.

Meanwhile, Emilia also embarks on a sort of quest for repentance and redemption. After seeing how many good people have suffered due to many heinous crimes committed by many local criminal organizations including the one formerly belonging to her, she requests more help from Rita, and they come to form a non-governmental organization for locating the bodies of those numerous missing persons out there.

Around that point, Audiard’s screenplay, which is based on Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name which was in turn loosely adapted from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel “Écoute”. throws some questions on whether Emilia can actually redeem herself in the end, but then it stumbles more than once as busily juggling too many different story elements together. For example, a romantic subplot between Emilia and a widow named Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz) is seriously under-developed without much dramatic impact, and another subplot involved with Jessi’s increasing conflict with Emilia is resolved too hurriedly in my inconsequential opinion.

At least, the musical scenes in the film are often quite impressive on the whole under Audiard’s good direction, and his crew members including cinematographer Paul Guilhaumel and editor Juliette Welfling did a commendable job of keeping things rolling to the end. In case of the songs written by Camille, most of them work splendidly in the context of story and characters, and the score by Clément Ducol, who won the Soundtrack Award along with Camille when the movie was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival early in this year, is also quite effective as mixed well along with the musical numbers in the film.

Above all, the movie is held together well by the superlative efforts from its several female cast members, who deservedly won the Best Actress Award together at the Cannes Film Festival (The movie also garnered the Jury Prize for Audiard, by the way). While transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón is terrific enough for a possible Best Actress Oscar nomination, Zoe Saldaña, who may also get Oscar-nominated in the next year, finally gets a chance to fully present the range of her considerable talent on the screen, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz are also solid despite their rather under-written supporting roles.

In conclusion, “Emilia Pérez” a flawed but interesting genre piece which deserves some praise for its mood, style, and performance. Although I have some reservation in terms of story and characters (I am still wondering how it will be received by transgender or Latino and Mexican audiences, to be frank with you), it is definitely something you cannot easily forget, so I recommend you to take some chance with it.