Movie musicals can be sweeping, invigorating, and at their very best transporting, They mingle the high-flying fantasies and visual potential of the cinema, and we’ve gone through many waves of kinds of musicals. Today, we’re in an outlandish world of the outlandish musical, an experience in ironic air 210quotes, where stories that you never would have thought could be musicals would then dare to be different and attempt to be musicals. The much-anticipated Joker sequel, Folie a Deux, dares to be a challenging jukebox musical of old favorites. The French movie Emilia Perez tells the story of a cartel leader that undergoes a sex change and tries to do good with her second life. Both movies are deeply interesting messes as well as experiences I don’t think work as musicals.

In contrast, Netflix’s Emilia Perez is like an entire season of a telenovela streamlined into a two-hour-plus movie that manages to also, for better or worse, be a musical. It is filled with many outlandish and provocative elements you would never expect to be associated with singing and dancing, like a sex change surgery center. This movie mixes so many genres and tones that at one point it feels like you’re watching a crime thriller about Mexican cartels and their manipulation of those in power, and then the next moment it feels like you’re watching an absurd rendition of Mrs. Doubtfire, where a spouse has adopted a new identity and uses this to spend time with their kids they otherwise would not be able to do so. It’s a wild film-going experience; I can’t recall too many musicals that use street stabbings in syncopation with percussion. Because of its go-for-broke ambitions and veering tones, Emilia Perez is destined to be a cult movie, some that fall in love with its bizarre mishmash of elements, but most will probably be stupefied by the entire experience and questioning why, exactly, this was made into a musical.

In Mexico City, Rita Castro (Zoe Saldana) is a savvy defense lawyer tired of living in the shadows of her buffoonish bosses that rely upon her writing prowess to win cases. Someone sees great potential with her, and it happens to be Manitas del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon), the head of a dangerous cartel. He wants Rita to find the international means to finish the process of Manitas surgically becoming a woman. Under the gun, metaphorically and literally, Rita finds the doctors who will transform the dangerous him into a new her. Manitas then fakes their death, leaving his old life behind to start anew, including their children and wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez). Manitas becomes the titular Emila Perez, but rather retire in luxury, she wants to do good, and Emilia begins a non-profit organization that exhumes bodies, victims from the cartels, to provide closure for their widows and grieving families. Emilia then invites Jessi and their kids to come live in her estate, explaining she is a formerly unknown “aunt” to Manitas. Now Rita is trying to run Emilia’s organization, keeps Emilia from going too far in revealing her identity, and looking out for her own sake considering she’s one of the few that knows about a life before Emila Perez.

I know there will be hand-wringing and cultural tut-tut-ing about the movie’s implicit and explicit themes dealing with trans issues, exploring one woman’s exploration of self and securing the identity she’s always wanted through the lens of a lurid soap opera trading in stereotypes. It’s a lot of movie to digest, and while it feels entirely sincere in every one of its strange creative decisions, it’s also the kind of movie whose tone can invite snickers or derision, like the sex change clinic where a heavily bandaged chorus repeats words like, “vagioplastia” and “penoplastia.” It’s a movie with extreme feelings to go along with its extreme plot turns, but the whole movie feels like it’s trying to settle on a better calibrated wavelength of melodrama.

I think this could have been significantly improved by director/co-writer Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, A Prophet) had he embraced more of the movie’s outlandish reality breaking through. Too few of the musical numbers actually do something more than witness someone singing. The opening number, one of the best, involves Rita trying to compose a defense through the streets of Mexico City, while a crowd sweeps around her, often stopping to chime in as an impromptu chorus, sometimes setting up props for her use. It’s a great kickoff, the energy crackling, and I was looking forward to what the rest of the movie could offer. There’s only one other musical number that recreates this significant energy and engagement, a fundraising dinner for Emilia’s organization amongst the powerful members of society. While Emilia speaks at a podium, Rita struts around the floor, sashaying between the tables, and informing the audience about all the dirty deeds and skeletons of the assembled muckety-mucks. She’s literally manhandling the frozen participants, dancing atop their tables in defiance, and it’s a magnificent moment because of how it breaks from our reality to lean into the storytelling potential of musicals. These sequences work so well that it’s flabbergasting that Audiard has, essentially, settled for far less creatively for too much of his movie’s staging. The big Selena Gomez song is just her listlessly singing to the camera while shifting her weight while standing, like the laziest music video of her career. Why tease the audience with the crazy heights as a musical if you’re unwilling?

And now let’s tackle the music, which to my ears was too often rather underwhelming.It sounds like temp music that was intended to be replaced and never was. It’s lacking distinct personality, catchy or memorable melodies, anthems and themes, the things that make musicals enjoyable. The best songs also happen to be the best staged sequences, both involving Rita. These songs have a different vivacious energy by incorporating a hip-hop style of syncopation. “El Mar,” the song during the fundraising dinner, offers an infectious chorus adding extra percussive elements like people slamming fists down onto tables, listening to plates and glasses rattle. These are the moments that enliven a musical and convey its style and panache. Alas, too many of the songs lack that vitality, and can best be described as blandly competent and too readily forgettable.

It’s a shame because Saldana is giving her finest screen performance to date (to be fair, I never watched her Nina Simone biopic). The actress best known for being the strong warrior in sci-fi franchises like Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Trek plays an intriguing character with a rising fire of purpose and paranoia. Early on. Rita is ambitious but unhappy, practically dowdy in appearance, and she begins to come alive under her new role for Emilia. Saldana is electric as she sings and dances and slips effortlessly between Spanish and English, possibly to her first Oscar nomination. She’s the standout, which is slightly strange considering the role of Emilia Perez should be the breakout. Gascon, a trans actress, is quite good in such an outsized role, and gets to play her pre-transitioned identity as well under gobs of masculine makeup and tattoos. The fault isn’t with Gascon’s performance, the issue is that her character has such amazing potential but feels criminally underdeveloped. There is a world of issues of self-identity, culture, repression, shame, anger, jealousy, desire, to name but a few, that could be richly explored from the perspective of the leader of a deadly gang wanting to become a woman. The character is left too inscrutable for my tastes, leaving behind so much unobserved drama. As a result, even though the movie is literally named after her, Emilia Perez feels like a projection more than a character, and if that was indeed the point, then we needed more conflict about that friction.

Emilia Perez is a lot of things all at once; campy, ridiculous, sincere, crazy. It’s messy but it’s an admirably ambitious mess, one that even the faults can be the unexpected charms for someone else. I didn’t fall in love with this genre-bending experiment, although I found portions to be fascinating and others to be confounding. I don’t even think the musical aspects were finely integrated and explored, and so they feel like more of a gimmick, a splashy attempt to marry the high-art of musical theater with the perceived lower-art of grisly crime thrillers and melodrama. It earns marks for daring but the execution is haphazard and scattershot at best. There are moments that elevate the material, where the musical elements feel confidently integrated and supported with the dramatic sequence of events, providing an unexpected and rousing response. However, those moments are few and far between, and the absence only further cements what could have been. Emilia Perez might be your worst movie of the year, a grave miscalculation in tone and storytelling, or it might be a transporting and wild experience, one that can lock up multiple Academy Award combinations for its artistic bravura, a middle-aged Frenchman telling the story of trans empowerment through the guise of a Spanish-speaking musical framework. It sounds like so much and yet paradoxically I was left disappointed that it wasn’t more.

Nate’s Grade: C+