How ‘Emilia Pérez’ Pulls Off Its Audacious Musical Numbers

The film’s most meta moment comes in “Mi Camino,” a karaoke-inspired number that finds Gomez breaking the fourth wall, as Jessi relishes in her plan to remarry and move away with her children—to Emilia’s great chagrin.

Audiard: Again, we have a change of form, a change of rhythm—we adopt basically a music video aesthetic. Camille and Clément Ducol, our composers, wrote this song very fast. I believe we were already shooting when they wrote it. We particularly wanted something where the character of Jessi would tell us something about the woman Selena Gomez, and that’s exactly what the lyrics here do. We have this very kitsch, very artificial aesthetic in which Selena Gomez talks to us, and I really like that. It’s a sincere song. What I liked is that in the most artificial form possible, someone told us the truth.

Guilhaume: The question here was, “What would this artifice be?” We asked ourselves, How do you film karaoke? How are you at the border of two genres? Jacques had the intuition very early that there should be a wall made of a screen behind them. While I was researching screen technology, people would talk to me of a latency of so many milliseconds per screen. I said, “So what does that mean? The latency?” If you have a large latency, you’re going to get video feedback, so the mirror effect that you have here—things will get out of phase. That’s what we see here with Selena smaller and smaller behind her. When I talked to Jacques about this, we realized that what everybody was telling us to avoid, video feedback, was actually really great. What we have here formally is Selena Gomez and Edgar Ramírez singing, facing the camera, and the video feedback is making time and space go out of phase.

Audiard: You might even say that’s a metaphor.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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