“Emilia Pérez” is one of the year’s most ambitious films, springing to the center of conversation from the moment it premiered at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize and the cast won the Best Actress award, to its release this month on Netflix. The film, directed by Jacques Audiard, stars Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Pérez and Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora Castro and Selena Gomez as Jessi Del Monte, and is a Spanish-language musical based on Audiard’s opera libretto. The story follows Manitas, a cartel leader in Mexico who contacts a lawyer to help him transition in secret and start a new life.
For the project, Audiard tapped Virginie Montel as both artistic director and costume designer. Anthony Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent Productions is a coproducer on the film, and many of the costumes came from Vaccarello’s archives. Montel had been involved in this story for so long that the first pages she recalls reading had Saldana’s character as a man.
“But then it became a woman’s movie,” she says. The opportunity to work on a musical with big dance numbers appeared to her from the beginning. “It was the singing and dancing. It opens a lot of possibilities that we don’t have in a regular movie,” she says.
Because Montel, who is known for her work on “Rust and Bone” and “La Haine,” served as both artistic director as well as costume designer, her work on the film began early.
Zoe Saldaña in “Emilia Pérez.”
Saint Laurent came on board rather late in the process, opening up Vacarello’s archives for use.
“We already had a really good idea of what we were doing,” Montel says. “We had the music, we had the dancing, and we knew when we had to be careful of the costumes because as Rita is dancing on the table, she needs to move.”
Saldaña and Gomez each wear Saint Laurent in the film. Saldaña’s standout looks include a red velvet suit, while Gomez wears a printed Saint Laurent blazer in one scene and a large fur coat while in Switzerland in another.
“Selena, we wanted her to be more like a gang girl at the beginning. We were more influenced by rap music than by Narcos,” Montel says. “In the second part [of the movie], she’d been in Switzerland for four or five years, so she has some more European looks because she played the game while she was there.”
Zoe Saldaña in “Emilia Pérez.”
As for the costumes that Gascón wears as both Manitas and Emilia, Montel says she worked to show the changing gender identity through the clothes.
“It was so tender, because we wanted her to be quite feminine. We wanted her to have colors, we wanted her to have print, we wanted her to have too many things. And then we [tone it] down because at one point, maybe sometimes we make it too much. And still she had a lot of prints, a lot of colors. She’s really elegant and feminine without being too much,” Montel says of Emilia’s costumes.
“She comes from Manitas, so it was also a conversation in between the two parts that Karla played. [Manitas] had that kind of football player style, then became that rap guy style, and then she had jewelry, she had long hair, when she’s Manitas. We wanted her to have some point where it could be a rap reference but it’s also quite feminine,” Montel says. “She had very big Cartier rings, she had this jewelry on the teeth, like gold teeth. She had long hair. So it was more interesting for us to find Manitas with a woman’s perspective.”
Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Pérez.”
A standout of Rita’s wardrobe is the red velvet suit she wears for a pivotal dance number.
“Everybody is talking about the red suit,” Montel says. “It seems to be like a song by David Bowie.”
She recalls going through the Saint Laurent archives with the goal of finding a red suit, though it all happened so fast she can’t recall the specific collection it came from.
“I wanted red,” she says. The suit feels to her both like “an English rock show,” while paying homage to the history of Saint Laurent.
“It is really a signature of Saint Laurent, the smoking [jacket,”] she says.
Each character’s style changes drastically throughout the film, a challenge Montel welcomed.
“We had such a change from the first part of the movie to the second part of the movie,” Montel says. “The movie is always in transition, like Emilia is.”
Karla Sofía Gascón in “Emilia Pérez.”
