All We Imagine  As  Light  Lost The Critics’ Award To The  Better  Film  Emilia Perez

No ,there is  no imperial conspiracy against the  Third World .Payal Kapadia’s  All We  Imagine  As Light lost  the  Critics Choice award  to Emilia  Perez  for the very simple reason that  was  a lesser  film.

Dare I say that?  For months now  we have born  spotlighting Ms  Kapadia’s  film as though  it was the best thing to happen to cinema since Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. Sorry, that was an over-reaction. I have seen Ray’s Pather Panchali innumerable times and  each time I came away with a new thrill.

  I saw All We  Imagine as light a second time and could barely  sit through it. While the salient characters’ profound forlornness is  palpable—the nurses need some serious healing—the  second overture in the  Maharashtrian village lacks space elegance and even coherence.

   French  auteur  Jacques Audiard’s  new work  Emilia Perez, is a beast hard to tame. It is  a sprawling wonderland of genre mixes where a musical coalesces  cheekily with a crime thriller.Let’s say, it combines Al Capone with  Andrew Lloyd Webber and  comes  up with a  brackish heady brew that is hard to ignore.

   My bait  for this movie date  was the director’s 2015 film Dheepam, a  moving  fiercely original  film  about  three Tamil refugees who flee Sri Lanka’s civil war  to France. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

   Emilia Perez is  even more audacious  . It stars the trans-actor Karla Sofía Gascón as a  man who hires  a lawyer in  Mexico,  Rita Castro( Zoe Saldaña) to facilitate her gender-correction operation. Gascon  won  the  Best Actress award at  the  2024 Cannes Film Festival and rightly so.Her performance is  transfixing. She portrays  the transition from male to female so convincingly that I thought the  early portion as  a man was  played by some other  (male) actor.But no. That’s the same  actor  taking us on the  protagonist  Emilia’s turbulent  journey from one gender to the other with devastating conviction and poignancy.

   “Poignancy”, one  would think, would have no  place in  this fabulous modern fable of crime,music and gender-crossing  afterlife . Thanks to the  lead actor the  rough,jagged edges of  the brutal yet frail tale  are done away with.  What we are left with is  the throbbing pain of a  man who crosses over  but cannot  leave his baggage behind.

   The  execution  of  the  plot is  not  sold on  basic rules of plausibility. The entire  process  of  transporting the  protagonist from one life to another is undertaken in an unmistakably  theatrical tone. The songs are particularly impedimentary . They  pop up  unannounced   in the midst  of the human complexities, wrestling  a  place  for themselves  willy nilly.

   I am  not sure why  the  director has chosen to tease  songs  and dances into  the  drama. Broadway meets melodrama  in a clasp that  is not quite  comfortable. The songs’  placement is also problematic :  when Rita  visits the  doctor for her client’s   gender-correction  surgery, the  doctor(Mark Ivanir)  starts singing his  misgivings rather than stating them.

  In fact the songs are  purposely placed in awkward positions, as if to remind us  that life’s monstrous  unpredictability needs a prop to make it bearable.

  The crossover sections when the  gangster Manitas transforms in Emilia are  handled with  care, as are  the political  overtones of a Mexico  on the brink that are  insinuated  into the story, sometimes with savagely humorous  results.

When a  woman is informed  that her  “missing”husband has been found she shows up to claim him with a knife to kill him , and is much relieved when told he is dead.The laughs are not unwelcome  in  this sobering drama of  finding the self in  a world of  unsolvable riddles.