gsygsy

Embeth Davidtz has had a good career as an actor. I first became aware of her as Miss Honey in Danny DeVito's movie of MATILDA, in which she was warm and endearing without a trace of sentimentality -- quite an achievement. Next time I encountered her was in JUNEBUG in which presented a completely different but equally believable character. It was evident that she was a high-quality artist. But nothing could have prepared me for how brilliant she is as a mother at the end of her tether in this excellent movie. Not only that; she directed and co-wrote it.

Her major triumph as a director is to bring out from young Lexi Venter a tough and beguiling performance. The whole story is seen through her character's eyes, so everything rests on her, and she totally delivers under Ms Davittz's expert guidance.

The movie is based on a memoir by Alexandra Fuller, who is the film's co-writer with Ms Davitdz. It tells of Ms Fuller's experiences as a child observing the process of her settler-colonial parents and their neighbours facing up to (or, in most cases, not facing up to) the return of the land that had been acquired in what had been Rhodesia to the newly-independent nation of Zimbabwe. The counterpointing of the political and domestic in Ms Fuller's story is its great strength, and director Davidtz makes it the spine of the film.

There's terrific support from the whole cast, with a special shout out to Zihkona Bali as Sarah, a worker in the colonial household who finds herself at the centre of a storm.

I really can't recommend this film highly enough. Please see it.

Enjoyable enough movie with two demanding leading roles and two supporting roles requiring excellent performers. The first two are played by Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofia Gascón, the second two by Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. This quartet shared the Best Actress award at Cannes 2024. They deserved it. Saldaña in particular is a revelation.

Of writer-director Jacques Audiard's previous films, I've seen four (The Beat that My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone, and The Sisters Brothers), each memorable in their different ways. None of them prepared me for this one, so hats of to him for not getting stuck in a genre rut.

There's a lot of story and a lot of singing in Emilia Pérez. When the singing is paired with Damien Jalet's incisive choreography, the effect is thrilling. Otherwise, the songs drag the movie down. They are musical-theatre lite, don't dig deep, so are not up to the dramatic demands put upon them. They're at their best in the rap-inclined numbers, where rhythm is the most important element.

The moral of Emilia Pérez seems to be that we can never slough off the past, change who we are or what we want. It's a strangely bleak vision to present in a musical.