“Emilia Pérez” shouldn’t be what most would conjure when considering of a film musical. And therein lies its superpower.
Its writer-director, Jacques Audiard, selected to inform the story of a brutal Mexican drug cartel lord (performed by Karla Sofía Gascón) who undergoes profound modifications in midlife — together with gender-reassignment surgical procedure — as a romantic, comedian, musical drama that doesn’t shy from its darkish themes and social commentary. Winner of the Cannes jury prize, soundtrack award and actress awards (shared by Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz), it’s surprising at each flip, with private development right here and actual menace there, requiring many alternative sorts of authentic songs.
That’s the place composers Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais — higher often called singer-songwriter Camille — got here in. They crafted a set of songs in a spectrum of genres, together with two that show the movie’s vary: the self-actualization pop ballad “Mi Camino,” carried out by Gomez, because the spouse of the cartel boss, by way of karaoke; and the showstopping, rock-rap denunciation of toxic hypocrisy, “El Mal,” by which Saldaña (with an help from Gascón) blows up the display.
Zoe Saldaña, left, and Karla Sofía Gascón within the film “Emilia Pérez.”
(Netflix)
Audiard initially wrote “Emilia Pérez” as an opera libretto (impressed by Boris Razon’s novel “Écoute”), however when it got here to the screenplay, he was all ears.
“Jacques didn’t want to work with a script that was already fully fledged,” Ducol says. “He gave us 30 pages of a treatment, and he wanted the music to contribute to the script … to basically build the story through our songs. He wanted the music to be in the heart of the action, the storytelling, the characters’ psychology.”
“Mi Camino” (“My Path”) is an efficient instance of how the songs — and the casting — helped form the characters.
“At the start, [the wife] Jessi was basically passive-aggressive. … Jacques realized we wouldn’t become attached to her enough,” says Camille. Earlier than the position was solid, Camille and Ducol had a few songs for the cartel kingpin’s spouse who thinks she is a widow and emerges from her shell, however Camille says they had been too comparable: “The [first] song was just, ‘I’m having fun, I’m having sex, I’m high.’ We had another that was, ‘I’m high, I’m having sex.’ Different atmospheres but going around in circles.” The casting of Gomez spurred the writer-director to flesh out the character.
He informed the songwriters, “‘I want to bring something from Selena’s life to her. I want the song to be carrying something new for Selena,’” Camille says.
(Annie Noelker/For The Occasions)
“We didn’t have the opportunity to meet her in person [before writing the song] but did meet her through her documentary,” says Ducol of “My Mind & Me,” the 2022 movie that explores Gomez’s real-life mental-health struggles. “Her sensitivity was so engaging and so strong that the song was created very quickly. We wrote it in the space of a few hours. For some songs, like ‘El Mal,’ we had dozens of different versions. ‘Mi Camino’ just came to the surface.”
The tune, she provides, grew to become “deeply touching, full of heart.” On the opposite finish is “El Mal,” a driving condemnation of the horrible individuals — murderers, corrupt politicians — contributing to the onetime drug lord’s charity aiming to find the stays of cartel victims.
“Each time Jacques mentioned it, he was angry. Once, he was almost crying. Corruption [and] hypocrisy and these [evil] people doing charities … I think this song was really meant as revenge for him,” Camille says. “We tried this Bob Dylan-y thing, like …” she rattles off a rapid-fire nonsense illustration of “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “then we went through something more funky, more ironic, kind of Talking Heads,” she says, laughing. “Then it was more hip-hoppy. Then we ended with this more hard-rock feel that suits Zoe very, very nicely.”
In a single verse, Saldaña sings/raps Spanish lyrics that translate to: “The chemist, he recently had his business partner and family killed / All to the slaughter! / And what did they do with the corpses? / Acid!”
“I remember [repeating] these lyrics over and over, and I felt like throwing up. They’re horrible people. And to find the right rhythm and the right pace and the right breaths — I was literally crying. So I’m glad Zoe took it over. And danced it. We needed a dance,” Camille says with amusing.
Ducol says, “What I like in ‘El Mal’ is that we are talking about things that are quite harsh, and all of a sudden, we find ourselves before a true musical number, and we understand we are no longer in reality-based cinema. There’s dancing, and there’s singing, and there’s jumping up and down on tables, and all of the other characters become like puppets in Japanese theater. The viewer gains awareness of the story at a deeper level.”