‘Emilia Pérez’ is a flamboyant genre-twisting Mexican cartel crime thriller which erupts at various junctures into a musical, a soap opera, and a trans drama. A top mafioso wants to reinvent himself by going through gender reassignment surgery, and hires a lawyer to facilitate the process by procuring the best surgeon, based in Israel, to conduct it, and then years later reappears as Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), now functioning as a champion of children who have disappeared from the country and posing as her children’s aunt in order to be close to them.

Emilia’s former wife, who simply assumes that her husband is dead, reveals that she had an affair during their marriage and is thinking of getting married to a new husband, and this knowledge brings Emilia into ‘Godfather’-type territory with the (former) Mafioso who can never escape their past and who returns to their former life in order to avenge an act of betrayal. The songs are deliberately rudimentary and kitsch, which stands in contrast to the more sturdy and well-choreographed scenes of gangster mores and the battle to keep a family unit together when none of the members are aware of the true identity of their new benefactor.

Like ‘Carlito’s Way’, also, there is the core theme of the inability of truly escaping one’s past, and that no amount of disguise or reassignment away from the toxic masculinity that epitomized Emila’s past life, can change one’s core personality. Female empowerment is underscored and accentuated here by means of giving us the counterpoint of a brutal mob boss who no longer identifies with his gender and needs to find expression in a new body. Turning this into a musical may have been a genuinely inspired move as everything about ‘Emilia Pérez’ requires a certain suspension of disbelief.

It even veers into melodrama territory towards the end by giving us Emilia in a relationship with one of the women whose child went missing precisely because of someone like Emilia who, we sense, may be attempting to atone for their previous complicity as the head of a cartel to cause plenty of Mexican children to disappear. The question of whether a malignant mob murderer can morph into a compassionate crusader against child abductions lies at the heart of this picture which presents us with an ingenious and creative delineation of the redemption card. It is this sort of audacity which is instrumental to ‘Emilia Pérez’ in the way that it gives us a character arc from extreme masculinity to female empowerment, and it is clever for the way we are then invited to query the degree to which we want to buy into it.