“Emilia Pérez” is not what most would conjure when thinking of a movie musical. And therein lies its superpower.
Its writer-director, Jacques Audiard, chose to tell the story of a brutal Mexican drug cartel lord (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) who undergoes profound changes in midlife — including gender-reassignment surgery — as a romantic, comic, musical drama that doesn’t shy from its dark 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 unexpected at every turn, with personal growth here and real menace there, requiring many different kinds of original songs.
That’s where composers Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais — better known as singer-songwriter Camille — came in. They crafted a suite of songs in a spectrum of genres, including two that demonstrate the film’s range: the self-actualization pop ballad “Mi Camino,” performed by Gomez, as the wife of the cartel boss, via karaoke; and the showstopping, rock-rap denunciation of poisonous hypocrisy, “El Mal,” in which Saldaña (with an assist from Gascón) blows up the screen.
Audiard originally wrote “Emilia Pérez” as an opera libretto (inspired by Boris Razon’s novel “Écoute”), but when it came 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 a good example of how the songs — and the casting — helped shape the characters.
“At the start, [the wife] Jessi was basically passive-aggressive. … Jacques realized we wouldn’t become attached to her enough,” says Camille. Before the role was cast, Camille and Ducol had a couple of songs for the cartel kingpin’s wife who thinks she is a widow and emerges from her shell, but Camille says they were too similar: “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 told 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.
“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 film 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 song, she adds, became “deeply touching, full of heart.” On the other end is “El Mal,” a driving condemnation of the terrible people — murderers, corrupt politicians — contributing to the onetime drug lord’s charity aiming to locate the remains 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 representation 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 one 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 a laugh.
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.”