An exuberant ode to human possibility

VERY RARELY DOES THE RIGHT MOVIE ARRIVE AT precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion is in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated.

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

Jacques Audiard's operatic musical Emilia Pérez is the story of a disillusioned lawyer working in Mexico, Zoe Saldaña's Rita, who gets a mysterious phone call and is whisked, blindfolded, to a secret location. There, the gruff leader of a drug cartel, Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, outlines a delicate but lucrative mission. Manitas wants to transition to living as a woman and wants Rita to arrange the surgery and subsequent disappearance. Rita pulls it off: In a few years, Manitas re-emerges as the person she always knew she needed to be. She is now Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón plays both roles), free to live as she chooses. Rita thinks her mission is over, though it's just beginning.

In fiction, as in real life, it's easy to view a dream fulfilled as a happy ending. But after Emilia gets what she wants, she asks, Now what? Emilia Pérez is a story not about personal fulfillment but about personal responsibility, and what happens after you become the person you were destined to be.