Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Jacques Audiard, Valérie Schermann, Anthony Vaccarello   Director: Jacques Audiard   Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, with the collaboration of Thomas Bidegain   Cast: Zoë Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Adriana Paz, Selina Gomez, Édgar Ramírez, Mark Ivanir and Eduardo Aladro   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

Audacity can be a fine thing, but sometimes trying too hard can be self-defeating.  That’s the case with Jacques Audiard’s musical melodrama, originally intended by him as an opera—in which form the story, inspired by a segment of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel “Écoute,” might have been more successful, even though it would definitely have been a soap opera.  As it is, the combination of drama, song-and-dance, farce, social commentary and tragedy in “Emilia Pérez” makes for a truly bizarre mélange.      

The initial focus is on Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer in Mexico City with an extraordinary facility for composing effective courtroom speeches for her boss (Eduardo Aladro) to deliver.  Naturally she’s frustrated that he takes credit for her work, and pained by the fact that her defense summations pervert justice by getting guilty people off, but it’s a job. 

Among the clients whose acquittal her skill is instrumental in winning is a media mogul accused of killing his wife, and drug cartel boss Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), recognizing who’s really responsible for the outcome, is so impressed that he summons Rita furtively to a meeting, where he promises her wealth and influence if she assists him in achieving a change in his life.

That change involves gender transition.  Manitas reveals that he’s been receiving hormone replacement treatment and enlists Rita to find a specialist willing to perform the surgery that will complete the process.  Manitas’ death will then be feigned, and Rita will arrange for Emilia Pérez, his female persona, to disappear.  Naturally Manitas will have to leave his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children behind, but they will be amply provided for, and protected, in Switzerland.

Confronted with an offer she can hardly refuse, Rita interviews possible surgeons, and finally Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir) in Tel Aviv is convinced to take charge.  The procedure is a success, Rita is amply rewarded and Emilia goes off, with plenty of money at her disposal, to make a new life for herself.

Four years later Rita finds herself at a sumptuous affair in London seated beside a woman who reveals herself as Emilia.  She’s decided that she cannot get along without her children and instructs Rita to inform Jessi that she’s a relative of Manitas who feels responsible for helping to raise the children back in Mexico.  Jessi ultimately agrees to the arrangement: it will afford her the opportunity to resume the affair with Gustavo Bon (Édgar Ramírez) she’d been having before Manitas’ death.  So Jessi and the children move into Emilia’s compound not knowing who she really is, and Rita reluctantly becomes an integral part of their lives.

Complexities now abound as Emilia, finally realizing the extent of the pain cartel violence has caused after her son indicates that he intuits who she is, decides to create a foundation called La Lucecita to assist grieving family members in discovering the fate of relatives who’ve gone missing.  In the course of its work Emilia meets Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz), a woman searching for news of her husband, and the two become involved.  Meanwhile Jessi has taken up again with Bon, and when she announces that she and the children will leave with him, Emilia explodes, leading to a last act that includes kidnapping, a shoot-out, chases and death.

In presenting this strange brew, Audiard resorts to flamboyance on a major scale.  Though he uses some Mexican location work, he’s shot the film largely in Parisian studios, showcasing the elaborate production design of Emmanuelle Duplay and Anthony Vaccarello and the costumes of Virginie Montel, while he, cinematographer Paul Guilhaume and editor Juliette Welfling use myriad devices, from split screens to hazy transitions and dreamy dissolves, to energize what amounts to a filmed stage musical jazzed up to keep the adrenalin flowing.  Yet he’s also intent on wringing every ounce of emotion out of the scenario, so that the movie is a weepie as much as a thriller.

It would help, however, if the movie were particularly well-written, and the musical numbers better than mediocre.  Unfortunately, the dialogue is more pedestrian than inspired, the songs composed by Audiard and his collaborators Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais for the most part prosaic, and the choreography by Damien Jalet unimpressive.  All the cinematic razzmatazz in the world can’t make up for material that, apart from the supposedly daring premise and occasional verbal shocks, isn’t nearly as bold as it thinks it is.

To be sure, there’s compensation in the performances.  Paz is affecting and Gomez tries very hard, but Saldaña and Gascón are absolutely outstanding, with the latter in particular capturing the rage, sadness and determination of a person unable to jettison the past but resolved to seek redemption for the wrongs committed during it.

But even they cannot salvage a film that aims for an artsy edginess it never achieves.  “Emilia Pérez” is so anxious to startle us that it neglects simply to move us.    

Producers: Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus, Robert Eggers   Director: Robert Eggers   Screenplay: Robert Eggers   Cast: Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson and Simon McBurney   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

As a visual exercise, Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is a wondrous thing, with a production design (Craig Lathrop), costumes (Linda Muir) and cinematography (Jarin Blaschke) that give every image the feel of a haunting dark fable; the contrast with the look of Werner Herzog’s far plainer 1979 version of the story is striking.  As a horror film about vampires or a homage to its predecessors, though, it’s pretty much a bust that audiences will find it difficult not to giggle at.  Of course, perhaps that was the writer-director’s intention, if the stilted dialogue and over-the-top performances are anything to go by.  One hopes so, though even then it can’t hold a candle to Roman Polanski’s witty “The Fearless Vampire Killers.”

The movie shares its title with F.W. Murnau’s classic and Herzog’s staid but imaginative reimagining, but it’s actually a hybrid, following Henrik Galeen’s 1922 script in the basics but adding a good deal of new material, much of it drawn from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (which, of course, the original’s makers were sued for pilfering at the time, resulting in Murnau’s film being withdrawn from circulation and nearly lost).  But Eggers provides additional tweaks of his own, most notably an explanation for why the vampire emerges when he does and why his intentions are so specific.      

As with Galeen-Murnau, the film is mostly set in the fictional coastal town of Wisburg, Germany, in the late 1830s. A stiff Nicholas Hoult (who played Dracula’s long-suffering assistant Renfield in last year’s eponymous Nicolas Cage misfire) returns to bloodsucker territory as Thomas Hutter, a young clerk assigned by his boss Herr Knock (wildly over-the-top Simon McBurney) to travel to the Carpathian mountains.  There he’s to secure the signature of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) to a deed of sale whereby the nobleman will take title to a dilapidated mansion in Wisburg.  The place just happens to be situated right across the street from the humbler home where Hutter lives with his new, devoted bride Ellen (pretty but vapid Lily-Rose Depp), whom he installs with his friend Friedrich Harding (uptight Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (bland Emma Corrin) before departing, since she suffers from fits that seem inexplicable, though Eggers will provide an explanation for them.

Hutter’s trip is hard but relatively uneventful until he reaches an inn near Orlok’s castle.  There he’s warned about vampires, and before proceeding he encounters a nocturnal exhumation ritual intended to ward off the undead—another of Eggers’ additions.  When, after a spectral carriage ride, he reaches the castle, he’s welcomed by Orlok, who as embodied by Skarsgård is far from the ghostly, emaciated figure so memorably played for Murnau by Max Schreck (and for Herzog by Klaus Kinski).  He’s a burly, mustachioed Cossack with a booming voice and long fingernails, and skin that, when glimpsed, appears to be disintegrating; Skarsgård pretty much disappears into the makeup and furry costumes without registering the ghoulish menace of his predecessors. 

In Castle Orlok Hutter is introduced to the grisly reality of the count’s macabre existence, and after enduring his menacing fangs himself, escapes and makes his way back to Wisburg.  Meanwhile Orlok has gotten there as well, via a sea voyage on a ship that carries death and destruction along with him and his coffin.  Its arrival brings plague to Wisburg, leading Hutter to enlist disgraced Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who amuses himself more than he does us with an abundance of mannerisms), a specialist in the occult, to destroy the count and his minion Klock while the skeptical Harding, the owner of the cursed ship, and Von Franz’s former student Dr. Siever (dull Ralph Ineson) look on incredulously.  But as in Murnau, it’s Ellen who destroys Orlok, though Eggers provides a much more psychologically convoluted rationale behind her actions.

In many visual as well as narrative respects, Eggers takes his cue from Murnau; the initial conversation between Hutter and Knock, for example, is very nearly a copy, and at the close he seizes on the movement of Orlok’s shadow just as Murnau had so effectively done.  But otherwise he diverges from the model.  On his return to Wisburg Hutter is an active participant in the pursuit of the count, as opposed to the feeble invalid he is in Murnau and Herzog, and the role of Von Franz is vastly expanded, though he isn’t made into the knowledgeable vampire specialist of the Hollywood/Hammer Van Helsing.  Eggers also plays a clever trick with a sequence in which Hutter and Von Franz destroy Orlok’s coffin.

As might be expected, he also takes advantage of the enormous advances in effects that have been achieved over the past century, and the audience’s capacity—even demand—for gruesome shocks.  Klock’s appetite goes far beyond flies now, and when Orlok expires you can be certain it’s not in a simple puff of smoke.  Whether you consider this an improvement will be a matter of taste, but visual effects supervisor Angela Barson and David White, who designed the prosthetic and makeup effects, have certainly done their jobs impressively.  The sumptuous images confected by Eggers and his team are enhanced by Damian Volpe’s eerie sound design and an eclectic score by Robin Carolan that varies from symphonic romanticism to dissonant riffs to fit the different moods, while editor Louise Ford relishes both the deliberate pacing of most of the movie and the energy of the occasional action scenes.                        

This newest “Nosferatu” can be admired for its exquisite look, but as narrative it comes across more as a slightly absurd period pageant than a genuinely frightening take on a horror classic.