The choreographed spectacle of ‘Emilia Pérez’

“Emilia Pérez” transcends traditional narrative filmmaking to tell the story of a Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) who hires a lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help her forever disappear and live her dream of transitioning into a woman. The task for cinematographer Paul Guilhaume was lensing a film that’s neither a straight musical, drama nor comedy but all of those things and more. “Jacques [Audiard] wanted the actual drama to unfold during the musical pieces, so each song was a key moment to the storytelling,” Guilhaume says of the director. Musical scenes were designed with ambitious intent, their choreography and lyrics rooted in the characters’ deepest thoughts and visually expressed with fluid camera language. “Jacques’ vision is about movement. How one movement brings you to another movement, how a character brings movement to a fixed frame, or how a moving frame brings movement to a fixed situation,” Guilhaume says. During a scene where Jessi (Selena Gomez), the wife of the former drug kingpin, sings “Bienvenida,” the desire was to photographically “access her interiority through the dancers” as a way to metaphorically represent Jessi’s suppressed anger. “We wanted the light to be very raw and very crude,” he says. “It had to look more like a nightmare.”