Do you like masterpieces?

A man (and therefore a film buff, film critic...) makes plans, a cinematic the gods laugh. More concretely, it looks like this - the original plan was for this to be a collective critical review of several films from the program of the first days of the 30th Festival of Original Films in our capital, but then a "break" happened. So, the plan was to include those films that it can be assumed will not immediately be distributed in cinemas of such a range, that is, about films I will avenge this world with love., Cover, Dry, Memoirs of a Snail, Everything we perceive as light etc. etc., but then there was a bottleneck that is not so easy to cross. Namely, in order not to further dilute the already thin threads of this wobbly mystery - on the second night of the festival, this critic's personal favorite and the most anticipated title from the offer gathered there - the latest film by the masterful Jacques Audiard - was shown. Emilia Perez, and the said plan lost its meaning. And so, after the new Odiyar, it became tiring and even unnecessary to watch films because, even in spite of their objective achievements, they were so far behind Emilia Perez (perhaps the highest quality among all the more ambitious and unique film works in this tired year) that the question arose whether the heart and only nominally reined in filmophilia still has clear boundaries that cannot be crossed just like that. Willy-nilly, faced with epitomes that really are, we easily fall into the darkness of comparisons with a clear outcome in advance and into the mire of analogies that are extremely stretched precisely because of the insurmountable disparity between the two sexes that should be brought into a sufficiently meaningful and convincing associative arc. And Odiarova Emilia Perez it represents a serious disruptive factor, because, quite simply, it is the perfection of a film (and that in the sense in which the phrase "perfect film" is used in his public tirades and in that field the persuasive Quentin Tarantino, of course, made stars by forging his favorites and /or formative influences).

A Emilia Perez, apart from being the perfection of a film, could (of course, in some ideal circumstances) serve as a healing/beneficial and formative influence not only on those who are motivated by women to try their hand at filmmaking, but also on, and in the first place, film lovers, who in that existential dimension may live and exist primarily because of such films, which are excess, but excess must remain so that we can we get to know at least most of their values ​​and uniqueness.

In terms of genre, Odijar u To Emilia Perez ranges from a sufficiently brutal gangster drama and a diegetic musical (that is, a musical in which parts of the action and development of the plot are communicated through songs, where the actors can hear the song or perform it themselves), all in the context of the Mexican criminal milieu and the dark world of the cartels and bloody factions. It must already be pointed out what makes this film a (also perfect) queer film - the main thrust of the action is the moment when a hard-working, hard-working young lawyer is hired by a mysterious and terrifying cartel leader to help him carry out his plan - to change his gender. and became a woman. Not for a single moment is it possible to notice even the faintest hint of a coarser seam at the junctions of these three arms and three aspects of the story, whereby the metaphorical stake here is additionally raised, because Emilia Perez, under the guise of a reality film, i.e. a film whose basic framework is nevertheless a naturalistic depiction of an action that is really possible at least in principle and in the reality dimension of someone's existence, and not only because of the Mexican context (and formally, it is a French-Belgian co-production), Audiard here openly reaches for the heritage of Latin telenovelas, with all that Alibaba's cave full of crazy solutions and tricks found in Latin soap operas, and with what one could also connect the motive of gender change in that whirlwind of alpha male bloody confrontations and supremacy. His skill is, as usual, reflected in the handling of finesse and the elegance with which he handles and juggles a self-imposed and self-chosen burden, and Jacques Audiard excels in this regard as well, because quite quickly (within a reasonable 132 minutes) he manages to create an impressive and a vivid illusion in which such a plot is essentially trivial and somewhat sleepy (a gangster in a new gender guise after several years of exile becomes a public figure, even enters into – admittedly indirect – contact with the world from which she escaped to a new life and a new identity), a very possible option.

On the other hand, the musical, as always a somewhat forced and theatrical form, requires considerable suspension of disbelief and extreme benevolence of the audience, which requires that the plot deals with typical, tried-and-tested, commonplace and reduced themes, and here Odiar succeeds in creating the momentum of an operetta range, where everything is somehow larger than life, and on the other hand, strongly and thoroughly imbued with life and reality. This is quite easy to feel, and it culminates whenever the musical passages start, i.e. the tracks, some of which also work on their own (in the sense that they could be exploited as separate songs of art-pop provenance), in which all the ingenuity of the author's process can be read, which is in that confusion of implications and encroachment, a strong, steady and kinesthetically valid organic connection was created, and here we have choreographed musical numbers, effortlessly and perfectly in place exactly where they appear. At the same time, Emilia Perez is a lot more - a melodrama reduced to its ideological essence, and in that respect closest to Odyar's previous film - Paris: A love story, which also deals with the issue of identity through the prism of bodily, sensual, carnal, eroticized, and can be seen as a more strictly staged and implemented musical, which, with all the limitations and conditions in the foundations of that usually undeniably indigenous American subgenre and then "filmic product" (what the entire history of Hollywood musicals taught us), requires a massive dose of craft virtuosity and versatility, which Jacques Odiar is by no means lacking.

On the level of ideas and motives, the most striking aspect is certainly the identity suffering, to which is added the idea of ​​essential constraint, even when it seems that some kind of tangible freedom has been won. Thus, the gangster, in her new form and life, remains restrained by her own alpha male drive for dominance, and the lawyer, in spite of that long lucrative engagement, which, at the moment when her old-new client moves in the direction of social engagement, also acquires clear contours of meaningful work, still all the way to the end we follow in this or that corner the starting point from which it has not completely escaped. Some kind of comfort comes in the also organic closeness that is born between the client and her legal representative, which is one of the many expertly grounded ideological pillars of the story and plot. Emilia Perez, and in that dimension of that relationship and that branch of the entire story, we can refer to what Fritz Peters expressed as an observation in his biographical book My journey with mysticism - Years of boyhood and youth with Gurdjieff (translated by Predrag Nikolić, published by Zlatno runo and Milstone): "It was possible for people to come together in other ways besides the physical; to, as he put it, 'touch each other's essence', but human beings lost this gift many years ago, many centuries ago. However, if one is more discerning, it is possible to see that this 'touching of essences' still occasionally occurs between two separate human beings, but only by chance, and that until then it has almost always been misunderstood and misinterpreted, or reduced to a purely physical form. which becomes worthless as soon as it is spent”. In this respect, since the essences of Emilia Perez and Rita Mora Castro really touch before the eyes of a more focused viewer, we can add to the story of the implied meanings of this masterpiece the judgment that this film, with its proven affiliation and genre gable of a gangster thriller, is at the same time and a utopia about the possible but hidden, and often wasted opportunities for indisputable and deeply lived closeness.

photo: promo

Whichever way you approach it, Odiar's film exudes impeccability both in the setting and in the performance itself; this applies to the overall stylization, which starts from veristic roots and reaches an emphasized aestheticization, precisely in line with the artificiality of the musical as a genre, which is a fact that cannot be escaped, and this film is determined to a large extent by the mature and finely tuned actors creations, in which Zoe Saldana leads the entire course of that dynamic and stormy story, with a slight veil of contemplative melancholia on her face, and it's a real shame that her role will certainly be evaluated primarily in the "set" with three of her striking colleagues, as it already started after the world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, there are films (even those significantly less perfect than this true pearl of Audiard) and beyond the awards and the media fanfare that accompanies them, just as there are certainly independent heroines of this great film and when their struggles and existential and identity shake cynically let's reduce it to telenovela general places. What survives everything, however, is the very core, the essence, the essence, and sometimes that essence comes into contact at the most appropriate moment with the essence of cinematic hunger for just such superior works, when everything else except that feeling of sincere elation is not important, because, well , yet it has been proven once again that even a film from the current offer can shine with the full splendor of its kinesthetic power, even to the point of causing a carom as explained in the first paragraph of this largely impressionistic presentation. Some encounters between cinephiles and film are simply a huge source of potential transformative power, but also a mutual and fate-directed meeting of the actors of a superb story, as is the case in this, let's repeat, a masterpiece purely of Odiar's forge.