By Bel Hernandez Castillo

The nine minutes standing ovation of French director Jacques Audiard’s latest film Emilia Perez at the Cannes Film Festival is a tribute to the Audiard’s vision and the three leads Karla Sofia Gascòn, Zoe Saldaña, and Selena Gomez who not only act in Spanish, but also dance and sing – it is a musical after all.

Emilia Perez is a film about cartel drug kingpin Juan “Manitas” del Monte’s  gender transformation into an elegant Spanish lady. It deals with heady topics like drugs, violence and psychology issues and at the end of the day, what money can, or cannot buy.  Saldaña plays Rita Moro Castro, a lawyer who is tasked with handling the legal matters of Manitas’ big shift from cartel kingpin to the women he has always been.  Selena Gomez plays Manitas’ wife Jessi, who after all is said and done, rekindles a relationship with a shady character, Gustavo (Édgar Ramirez) which just might unravel Emilia’s carefully laid family arrangements.

Gascòn, like her character in the film, is Spanish and also a trans woman in real life. This is the first film she has starred in as an actress after announcing her transition in 2018. Before that, she had a long career as a male actor.

Jacques Audiard was inspired for the idea of the musical from a chapter in a novel he read during the pandemic about a drug trafficker who yearns to change his identity.

Saldaña in the role of the lawyer gets to go back to one of her first artistic art forms of expression, dance. She has several dance numbers she performs in Emilia Perez as well as singing a couple of songs.  As for acting in Spanish, she is she is fluent. Although born in Passaic, New Jersey, when she was 10 years old her family moved back to the Dominican Republic for seven years.

Gomez, on the other hand told Vanity Fair in a recent interview, that the “Scariest thing was speaking in Spanish, for sure,” but what she ended up realizing, while singing in Spanish in the film, is that she sings better in Spanish than speaking it.

Audiard (winner of the Palme d’Or with Dheepan in 2015) started writing the film during the pandemic, after being inspired from a chapter in a novel about a drug trafficker who yearns to change his identity. The film has emerged as one of Cannes 2024’s biggest hits among critics and audiences alike.

Emilia Perez takes place in Mexico but was filmed mostly in France with a few location shoots in Mexico.  The film is set to release August 28, 2024