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Watch Zoe Saldaña Confront Corrupt Politicians in ‘Emilia Pérez’
The director Jacques Audiard narrates the star’s passionate musical performance from the film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The actress Zoe Saldaña dons a red suit and fiercely works the room in this high-intensity sequence from the musical drama “Emilia Pérez.”Saldaña’s character, Rita, a lawyer in Mexico City, attends a gala with politicians while the title character Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) delivers a speech. This dreamlike sequence has Rita going table to table to confront attendees about their scandals, misdeeds and corruption as she sings the song “El Mal.” Emilia contributes verses from a lectern.The film’s French director, Jacques Audiard, narrates the sequence, discussing the rapid tempo of the song (they sped it up because Saldaña’s singing and dancing skills could meet the challenge), as well as working with nonprofessionals on intricate choreography (by Damien Jalet).Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More
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Jacques Audiard on ‘Emilia Pérez’ and Learning to Make a Musical
For the filmmaker Jacques Audiard, creating a movie musical meant learning the genre conventions from scratch.The French filmmaker Jacques Audiard is known for hard-hitting crime dramas with incisive social commentary. He doesn’t often enjoy musicals and doesn’t speak Spanish. Yet his latest work, the offbeat “Emilia Pérez,” which began streaming Wednesday on Netflix, is a Spanish-language musical set amid Mexico’s drug wars.He lifted his protagonist from the pages of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel, “Écoute,” about our hyperconnected, perpetually online world. One chapter features a ruthless Mexican cartel boss seeking a gender transition who hires a lawyer to help with the logistics.For the titular role, Audiard, 72, cast the Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón (a trans woman herself), and changed the attorney in the book from a man to a woman played by Zoe Saldaña. To write the movie’s many tracks, the director enlisted the singer Camille Dalmais and the composer Clément Ducol.Shot almost entirely on soundstages in Paris, the film debuted in May at the Cannes Film Festival to mostly positive reactions that praised the film for its way of “testing the limits of character sympathy as well as shifting tones and moods,” as The Times’s chief critic, Manohla Dargis put it, though some reviewers expressed reservations about the portrayal of Emilia Pérez, herself. In the end, the film’s four stars — Gascón, Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz — shared the best actress award, while the film itself won the jury prize (essentially third place).Speaking through an interpreter during a recent video interview while in the United States, Audiard explained how he came to try his hand at musicals with this timely subject.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Karla Sofía Gascón as the title character. Audiard said he had thought about making a musical and knew immediately that the “Emilia Pérez” story was the right subject for the form.Page 114/Why Not Productions, Pathé Films and France 2 Cinéma
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Allee Willis Documentary Sheds Light on Songwriter for Earth, Wind & Fire and ‘Friends’
‘The World According to Allee Willis’ shines a light on a musical artist whose creative spirit wasn’t limited to one genre or even to music.“I’m the world’s best-kept secret,” Allee Willis says at the start of a new documentary about her. Willis, a songwriter and artist, is being hyperbolic, but only a little: Unless you’re a music trivia hound, Willis’s remarkable career may have escaped your notice.I, for one, didn’t know until I watched “The World According to Allee Willis” (directed by Alexis Manya Spraic and in theaters starting Friday) that the same woman was a co-writer of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” the Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” and the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” better known as the “Friends” theme song. She wrote dozens more hits, too — sometimes lyrics, sometimes music — and occasionally produced them as well. She even contributed music and lyrics to the Broadway version of “The Color Purple.”It’s unfair but axiomatic that the most influential people are often the ones who fly under the radar, and that’s Willis, who died in 2019 at 72. Spraic’s approach is two-pronged. There are interviews with Willis’s many friends and collaborators, so many that I couldn’t jot them all down, but here are just a few: Lily Tomlin, Pamela Adlon, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, the comedian Bruce Vilanch, the singer-songwriter Brenda Russell and Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman, one of Willis’s closest friends.Somewhat unexpectedly, the mogul Mark Cuban appears a lot in the film, speaking warmly and earnestly of Willis’s expansive imagination. She spent much of the 1990s, in the still-nascent days of the internet, developing a collaborative social network and story-driven interactive platform called Willisville, and Cuban was her business partner.A lot of this was captured on video by Willis, who turned on a camera as a girl in Detroit in the 1950s and filmed constantly throughout her life. That is the other prong of Spraic’s film: There is a lot of Willis’s footage, which fills in details of her life, the ups along with the downs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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‘All We Imagine as Light’ Review: Tender Comrades
In Payal Kapadia’s extraordinary drama, three women in Mumbai search for connections amid the city’s vibrant and darkly alienating churn.“All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet drama about fragility, beauty and kinship, and what it takes to keep going in ordinary, difficult times. Set in contemporary Mumbai, it centers on three Hindu women, their everyday lives and the bonds that they share with one another as well as with the larger world. It’s the kind of modestly scaled and lightly plotted international movie — with characters who look and sound like real people, and whose waking hours are set to the pulse of life — that can get lost amid the year-end glut of Oscar-grubbing titles. So, it’s worth mentioning upfront that it is also flat-out wonderful, one of finest of the year.The women work together at a busy city hospital, where two are nurses and the third is a cook. The nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who looks to be in her late 30s, and the much younger Anu (Divya Prabha), are roommates and living with a runaway cat in a small, cluttered apartment. Both nurses have complicated personal lives. Prabha’s husband left her behind to work in Germany and has drifted away from her, leaving her achingly alone. Anu has a secret lover, a young, earnest Muslim man she’s trying to keep hidden from everyone, including her family and Prabha, a reserved woman of decorous sensitivity.The story develops organically to incorporate the cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a headstrong, middle-age widow. She’s struggling to stay in the apartment that she had shared with her husband, which developers now plan to raze. They’ve threatened her, if she doesn’t leave on their timeline (they’ve sent goons to her door), but Parvaty talks tough and conveys a resiliency bordering on obstinacy. When Prabha finds a lawyer to support her through her legal troubles, Parvaty flatly rejects the offer. “I don’t need any help,” she says with her back turned to Prabha. Like the two nurses, Parvaty seems determined to go it alone.In time, all three the women grow closer, and their lives become more intertwined, a shift that the writer-director Payal Kapadia develops with unforced naturalness and a remarkable lightness of touch. Kapadia has a background in documentary — this is the first feature-length fiction film she’s directed — and she integrates brief streets scenes of a thrumming Mumbai throughout “All We Imagine as Light.” Crucially, she opens the movie with a series of nighttime images of unidentified men and women working and wandering about the city, milling through busy streets, riding on crowded trains, visuals that she overlays with voices speaking different languages. “I was pregnant,” says one woman, “but I didn’t tell anyone.”This opening — with its seductive blur of anonymous voices and moving, always moving bodies — efficiently sets the scene and tone. As important, it also introduces a characteristic modernist concern with the attractions and the drawbacks of cities, with their frenetic swarms and cacophonous din, their liberating and soul-crushing anonymity. The city gives and it takes in equal measure, though not always fairly. It’s where Anu and her lover, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), can escape and melt into the crowd to hold hands, yet the city imperils Parvaty and may leave her stranded amid the clutter of fast-rising luxury towers. “Class is a privilege,” a billboard for one such tower blares. “Reserved for the privileged.”Though all the women receive their due, Prabha is the most central and vividly drawn. Physically reserved, with deep-set eyes that shuttle between searching openness and downcast reserve, she is revealed gradually and often through her interactions with others. She’s unassuming, polite to the point of deference and seemingly unaware of her striking looks. When a doctor, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), approaches her one night, asking if she’s been working late, she apologizes without apparent reason. “Sorry doctor,” she says, seemingly oblivious of his interest in her, “I lost track of time.” When they go their separate ways, he gives her a poem that he wrote for a competition, though also perhaps for her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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‘Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes’ Review: The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
A new documentary traces Humphrey Bogart’s development from stage actor to the embodiment of brooding cinematic cool.Produced in cooperation with Humphrey Bogart’s estate, the documentary “Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes” is an official portrait that nevertheless offers some insights into how one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and irreplaceable star personas evolved.Directed by Kathryn Ferguson, the film traces Bogart’s development from stage and backlot workhorse to timeless avatar of brooding cool. Louise Brooks, the great silent-screen star who died in 1985, is one of many Bogart friends whose recollections are featured in the film. She suggested that the reason Bogart could bring such complexity to Dixon Steele, the violent-tempered screenwriter he played in Nicholas Ray’s “In a Lonely Place” (1950), was because of how much he and Dix had in common.Bogart is portrayed in “Life Comes in Flashes” as a product of cold parenting. (His mother, Maud Humphrey, was an accomplished illustrator apparently dismissed by her son as a “housewife” on her death certificate, according to one interview subject.) He married three actresses — Helen Menken, Mary Philips and Mayo Methot — before Lauren Bacall. Each one is shown to have sharpened Bogart, even as his fame eclipsed theirs, to varying degrees.Words attributed to Bogart are read by Kerry Shale, an actor whose voice is dissimilar enough from Bogart’s to qualify as a distraction, at least initially. But Bogart’s own memories, and the way they’re illustrated with film clips, give the documentary a certain mystique. And it’s tough to resist gossip about Bogart’s friction with the film executive Jack Warner or even well-worn tales of the adventurer’s attitude that the director John Huston brought to the set of “The African Queen.” The two men drank so much, Bogart says in a much-cited quip that the movie repeats, “Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.”Bogart: Life Comes in FlashesNot rated. 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Red One’ Review: Santa’s Helpers Have Been Working Out
Starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, this Christmas offering has the courage to ask: What if the Santa Claus story was like a Marvel movie?Over time, Santa Claus movies have become inherently and forgivably silly. After all, there are only so many reasonable commercial twists you can put on one of the most commercialized characters in the Western world. It’s what has given us the contractual Santa (“The Santa Clause”); the pugilistic maniac Santa (“Violent Night”); the one about Santa’s degenerate brother (“Fred Claus”); and later this month, the Satan Santa (“Dear Santa”).Perhaps, then, we should be resigned to the inevitable corporate momentum that produces something like “Red One,” a film that has the courage to ask: What if the Santa Claus story was like a Marvel movie?In this one, directed by Jake Kasdan, Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is inexplicably jacked, Dwayne Johnson leads a kind of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. team to protect the Big Red, and Chris Evans has revived the sensibilities of an older superhero alter ego (not the noble sincerity of Captain America, but the slacker snark of Johnny Storm). It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.Cynical and struggling to feel the holiday spirit, Callum Drift (Johnson), the head of security for Santa (a.k.a. Red One), hands in his resignation letter on Christmas Eve before working his final holiday. Of course, Santa is mysteriously kidnapped shortly after, sending Cal into a frenzied search, replete with a dull blur of explosions and far more fight sequences than an earnest Christmas movie should be allowed.With the clock ticking, Cal and his boss, Zoe (Lucy Liu), are forced to call on Jack O’Malley (Evans), the tracker who helped facilitate the kidnapping itself. A deadbeat dad who, naturally, has Jason Bourne’s fighting skills, Jack has been a lifelong naughty-lister who’s only out for himself — until his ice-cold heart begins to melt while reluctantly assisting Cal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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‘Dream Team’ Review: Fax on the Beach
Nothing really makes sense in this homage to ’90s cable thrillers, but that’s sort of the point.Nothing about “Dream Team” is very serious, and it would be a waste of time to force meaning onto it. But that’s not a mistake; it’s the whole idea. Directed by the always adventurous team of Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (“Two Plains and a Fancy,” “L for Leisure”), the film is shot and structured to pay homage to late-night cable thrillers from the 1990s, complete with a cheekily erotic edge.The story, such as it is, is set around 1997 and follows two Interpol agents named No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel) and Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai) as they investigate a strange conspiracy that might involve murderous coral. Their journey takes them to Mexico, where they encounter a bevy of weirdos as well as a seductive scientist named Veronica Beef (Minh T Mia) with that most ’90s of jobs: marine biologist. Back in the office in British Columbia, two young women (Fariha Roisin and Isabelle Barbier) are supposed to be researching the case, but mostly seem interested in working out.It’s pretty silly, but that’s clearly a feature, not a bug. “Dream Team” is broken into episodes with titles like “Coral Me Bad” and “Fax on the Beach” (there is, in fact, a fax machine on the beach) and some naughtier wordplay. The movie was shot on 16-millimeter film, the grainy, smudgy look of which may make you feel like you’ve either dozed off or ingested hallucinogens. For long stretches, we’re just observing underwater corals, watching people dance in a club, or lingering in a desert littered with discarded aerobics equipment. The storytelling only enhances the disjointed sensation: The central plot waxes and wanes, and by the end seems to have trailed off into the sunset.That’s not to say that this is a bad movie, though whether you think it’s a good one will depend a bit on your tolerance for irony and the absurd. It is undoubtedly diverting. I dare you not to chuckle when one character begins researching a case by declaring, “I’ll start searching Lexis,” and the reply is, “got it — I’m on Nexis.” For viewers of a certain age, the nostalgia is enjoyable as well: There are dial-up modems and very old computer graphics and one of those abdominal crunch rocker devices I remember my father keeping in the basement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
