TIFF Dispatch 3: 'Queer' and 'Emilia Pérez' Disappoint but Other Films Excite

If we're looking at only queer-focused titles at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, two films would be considered the hottest tickets in town. The first is Jacques Audiard's "Emilia Pérez," which took Cannes by storm and took home both the Jury Prize (think of it as second runner up for the Palme d'Or) along with a shared Best Actress prize for its four female leads, including Selena Gomez. It's a massive gamble of a film, mashing up a pop opera with a Mexico-set cartel thriller before changing into a "Mrs. Doubtfire"-esque story to tell an epic tragedy. It's about as baffling as it is entertaining, until it's neither.

Despite the joint award for its four actresses, the obvious lead character is Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a defense attorney who's good at helping guilty clients avoid guilty verdicts. She impresses cartel leader Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) who kidnaps her in order to offer her millions of dollars. The offer has to do with a secret no one can know: Manitas is transgender, has been on hormone therapy for two years, and needs Rita's help to find a surgeon willing to help Manitas get gender confirmation surgery. Rita succeeds in her mission and gets her big payday, while Manitas fakes their death and emerges from surgery as Emilia Pérez.

Cut to four years later, when Emilia reaches out to Rita again with a different request. She misses her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children, who went into hiding in Switzerland after Manitas' fake death, and so Emilia asks Rita to bring them back to Mexico so they can live with her. Since none of them know Emilia's true identity, she poses as a distant relative of Manitas. Audiard directs these first acts with a level of commitment so intense that most of the criticisms one could lob at the premise bounce off by its sheer wackiness. After all, here is a film by a French director who doesn't speak Spanish, shot almost entirely on soundstages in France, that deals with Mexican political and social issues, as well as a title character who's transgender. By the time we see a musical number where doctors and nurses sing the various types of surgeries Emilia will receive, including the line "penis to vagina" belted out with zero irony, you can't help but throw your hands up and go along with it. Audiard isn't navigating a minefield of hot button issues so much as he's off in another galaxy doing whatever he wants.

For a good amount of time, it works as a piece of eccentric entertainment. Opinions on the main performances have varied since it premiered, but in my eyes this is Saldaña's film and her best performance to date. All four performances, from Saldaña to Sofía Gascón to Gomez and Adrianna Paz, who plays a love interest of Emilia's, are commendable, although Sofía Gascón is the only one to come close to matching Saldaña's skills due to having more to work with. But for as much fun as Audiard has building out this world and its characters within it, he has no follow-through. A rushed last act creates a conflict designed to bring the film to a tragic, inevitable conclusion, all at the expense of everything interesting that came before it. I'll give credit to Audiard for pulling off as much as he does here, but "Emilia Pérez" amounts to a flashy mess. By the end, I came away a little bemused and happy to go along my merry way while it does its own thing.

The other hot ticket at TIFF was Luca Guadagnino's "Queer," his adaptation of William S. Burroughs' novel of the same name. Set in Mexico City in the early '50s, it focuses on Burroughs stand-in Lee (Daniel Craig), one of many American men who find themselves in Mexico to take advantage of the cheap cost of living and freedom to indulge in their desires. William spends his days shooting heroin, drinking from one bar to the next, gabbing with other queer expats, and desperately trying to bed any man who strikes his fancy. Guadagnino leans into artifice from the start to get at the ambivalence of queer existence at the time, from Stefano Baisi's production design (most of it was shot on sets in Rome) to Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's cinematography (plenty of surrealist imagery and CGI establishing shots that looks like elaborate miniatures at times) and an anachronistic soundtrack with songs by Prince, New Order, Nirvana, and others. All of these elements purposefully don't come together, like trying to fit together jigsaw pieces from different puzzles. The soundtrack does the most heavy lifting in conveying how these men exist outside of time, their true feelings reduced to fleeting moments of passion when they can get it. There's no option where they can live as they wish. They can only exist in a constant, destructive state of limbo.

Guadagnino filters these ideas through William, who soon falls hard for the young, handsome new arrival in town Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee eventually succeeds at getting Eugene into bed, and while there's a passion between, them it's a doomed romance from the outset. That's where "Queer" settles itself into a forlorn slog, as Lee foolishly tries to make Allerton fall in love with him through a paid arrangement and, eventually, a trip to South America in search of ayahuasca in the Amazon. It's difficult to see why Guadagnino takes the romantic route given the flat execution. His direction is too fussy to ever be felt, a series of highly curated choices that doesn't translate to anything passionate on screen. Not helping matters is the overbearing score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which doesn't pair well with Daniel Craig's forced performance and Drew Starkey's blank slate of a role.