Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is a lawyer with a knack for crafting persuasive arguments that too often aid criminals escape justice. Once, she voluntarily agrees to being whisked away in a trailer speeding through the Mexican desert, her visionobscured. There, she meets Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón), the cartel kingpin, who offers two million dollars to assist with his gender transition. Manitas’s motivation, though, is not rooted in a crisis of conscience or personal safety concerns, but in a lifelong yearning for passion and the opportunity to sing. How this sensitive individual managed to helm the ruthless world of narcotrafficking, is never fully explicated, even through songs and dancing.

Regardless, Manitas’ dream is realized as he becomes Emilia Pérez, a transformation preceded by placement of his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two children in an elite Swiss resort and the staged simulation of his own death. Four years later, Emilia Pérez, now a vibrant matron with plump lips, a dazzling smile, clad in YSL, encounters the established Rita in an upscale London restaurant—a meeting that the latterintuitively senses is no mere coincidence. Indeed, it is not, for the fragile shoulders of Rita now bear the mission of returning Jessi and the children back to Mexico, without whom Emilia cannot abide.

The next part of the film has drawn parallels with the plot of “Mrs. Doubtfire” from some critics: Aunty Pérez dotes upon the children and seeks to ingratiate herself with Jessi. Coincidentally, Emilia and Rita also establish a non-profit organization dedicated to exhuming the victims of narcotics cartels across Mexico. Within this context, Emilia embarks upon a romance with Epifanía, the widow of one of suchvictims, who carries a knife in her purse as a grim reminder of her own traumatic marital experience. This relationship allows Emilia to “feel like a fifteen-year-old teenager once more.” However, this newfound happiness is short-lived, as Emilia is kidnapped by Jessie’s lover, who severs three of her fingers, agesture that in Mexico signifies a ransom demand of 30 million.

Jacques Audiard has long displayed a bold willingness for genre gymnastics, with a western, an immigrant drama, and now a musical in his filmography. Yet, in his latest endeavor, there isn’t a single hit (the most memorable act is Rita’s performance at the fundraising dinnerfor Emilia Perez’s foundation), unlike the work of fellow Frenchman Leos Carax, “Annette.”Audiard attempts to infuse the narrative with melodrama, passion, love, and identity crisis, but the scope of the story is so vast that the viewer barely has time to delve into the inner world of any of the characters. Their motivations remain too obvious, and instead of the much-vaunted passions, loves, dramas, and crises, we are left with mere hints of these complex states.

The director and his cinematographer, Paul Guilhaume, experiment with many visual solutions, most of which prove successful, but they never maintain fidelity to any single approach for long (apart from, perhaps, the engaging integration of the camera into the dance sequences). Time itself careens recklessly through the film, preventing the narrative from transcending the realm of superficial sensationalism. Consequently, the energetic potential of “Emilia Pérez,” undoubtedly present, simply dissipates into thin air.

At the NYFF premiere, Audiard stated that to have not capitalize on the potential of such a trio of actresses would have been the height of folly. Given the director’s impressive legacy, the label of “foolish” is certainly not one that applies. However, his musical, which fails to genuinely portray Mexico, the complexities of the trans experience, or the nuances of everyday live, may well be so branded by many. And yet, it is precisely the trio of heroines that makes the film worth watching until the end.