Editor Juliette Welfling has come to expect the unexpected from director Jacques Audiard. She’s cut all 10 of his French films, but “Emilia Pérez” (now streaming on Netflix) is the most experimental yet. The crime thriller/family drama marks their first musical. Welfling was naturally drawn to the operatic nature of the music (Clément Ducol composed the original score and French singer Camille wrote the original songs), but was most impressed that it was a modern fable.
“Often his films are about families and crimes as well, but there’s nothing realistic in this movie, it’s about anything,” Welfling told IndieWire.
“Emilia Pérez” stars Zoe Saldaña as Rita, a disgruntled lawyer fed up with the corruption in Mexico City, who assists drug lord Manitas Del Monte in undergoing gender confirmation surgery to become the titular woman (both played by Karla Sofía Gascón). It’s like a musical fever dream about transformation with gaudy, neon-lit musical numbers in sharp contrast to the rough naturalism of the violence.
Yet it’s also about the difficulty of leading double lives: “They all lead double lives,” added Welfling. “Rita at first is kind of a slave, and then she becomes this beautiful, successful woman. Emilia and Jessi [Selena Gomez] are the same. I thought it was really interesting. Can we have two lives? And how does it end?”
When Welfling first read Audiard’s script in 2019, there were no songs, and the Rita character was male. “It was really, really different, and then it evolved and we discussed why the thing was evolving [into the operatic quality he was after],” the editor said. “Obviously the musical sequences, the singing and dancing, that all has to be worked out and choreographed. But they were done when I arrived. It gives you less freedom than when you get a regular scene because you can do whatever you want.”
Unlike traditional musicals with their start and stop rhythms, the “Emilia Pérez” musical sequences flowed naturally from dialogue moments as part of a hybrid structure that allowed Welfling to cut for dramatic emphasis. For example, the film starts with the musical number “El Alegato,” during which Rita prepares the opening argument in defense of a politician that she knows is guilty of murdering his wife. She leaves a convenience store and goes onto the street, joined by a chorus of dancers in rebellion against the prevailing corruption and injustice. But she stops to type her argument while singing and later to speak with a restaurant owner. This helps establish the film’s heightened, operatic tone, in which characters express their emotions through song or dance, in and out of the fantasy.
“They shot this the first day of shooting,” Welfling explained. “It’s a very complicated scene. Obviously, they had been rehearsing a lot, thank God, but Jacques wanted to shoot the most difficult things at the beginning because he figured if we dive into a scene like this [first], then everyone will feel better having done it, so now we can go further.
“And it was a bit difficult, this scene,” she continued,” because the tempo keeps changing, going faster and faster, and then it goes slower again. And it was a bit of mess on the set because the click [track] was not recorded, so to cut it was a bit of a drag.”
But when Welfling arrived in the cutting room to watch the first set of dailies, she got a panicked phone call explaining that she had to cut the first day’s shoot that day: “Jacques is worried, he wants to see it.” Welfling had four hours. “And it was the first time I cut a musical scene,” she said. “I had to cut it very, very fast because they had only like two days to shoot this scene. And then they would have to destroy the set to make ready for another scene. But I had to understand how it works. You have to look at the performances first, exactly the same as regular scenes. Emotions. Emotions. But you have to be very rigorous.”
That sequence was vastly different from a later song, when Rta encounters Emilia years later for the first time at a business dinner in London. During “Por Casualidad,” Rita fears that Emilia wants to kill her, but Emilia puts her at ease, explaining that she misses her children and wants Rita’s help to reunite them in Mexico. It’s an intimate scene full of tenderness, but one that hints at the danger of leading double lives.
“It’s not that complicated because it’s like a short reverse shot,” Welfling said. “There’s nothing so special about it except that the performances are fantastic. They both have new lives. But Rita’s scared, she thinks she’s going to die. At first, she has these visions of Emilia as a kind of monster. She sees again her golden teeth that she had when she was Manitas. And then, little by little, she gets very moved by Emilia singing and being really truthful.
“To me, when I cut a movie, I try to put myself into the characters. And I figure, what would I want to watch?”
“Emilia Pérez” is now streaming on Netflix.