How Did Emilia Pérez’s Opening Song ‘El Alegato’ Come Together?

Zoe Saldaña performs “El Alegato”.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinêma

Jacques Audiard’s genre-combining noir musical, Emilia PérezIt opens with a defense. Zoe Saldaña stars as Rita, a defense attorney fed up with white-collar criminals who writes her closing statement and asks the jury to exonerate her client, a corrupt bureaucrat accused of pushing his wife off a balcony. But the following musical number, a massive parade through the streets of Mexico City, also functions as a plea to the audience: to accept, to accept, the peculiar world of the film in which Rita quickly becomes entangled with a drug lord (Karla Sofía Gascón). ) is looking for gender confirmation surgery. “From day one, there was an understanding that if we didn’t manage to make that scene convincing, we would lose the audience,” says choreographer Damien Jalet.

Audiard says the song, like the rest of the film, “ranges from telenovela to narco movie to family drama” and is similar to the song “”.El Alegato” means defense — doesn’t fit neatly into any category. It is both a rap and a power ballad, an orchestral anthem and a techno remix. “This guy kills his wife,” Rita begins in an almost ominous whisper, typing at her desk, her face illuminated by a screen showing ongoing protests against femicide, “and we claim suicide.”

Her breathtaking staccato intensifies even more as she passes a convenience store and steps out onto the street again. With a tone of voice that oscillates between pain and sincerity, he begins to write the speech that will finally free a man he knows is guilty. The pace picks up and a bustling open-air market emerges from the darkness, with dozens of dancers and market stalls milling around it, while several stand-alone scenes play out on stage, including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it knife fight. margins. “What are we talking about today, right now?” He talks-sings as a choir begins to echo his words. “We’re talking about violence, love, death, a country in pain.”

This is more than a closing argument. “This is the birth of the film,” says the song’s composer, Clément Ducol. It was also important to set a standard tonally. “We wanted to create a feeling where the viewer could begin to think that maybe everyday life could be viewed through this lens,” he says. “Maybe walking can turn into dancing; Maybe the noise from a construction site can turn into a percussion orchestra.”

Mapping “Rue Alegato”, a replica of CDMX street and open-air market.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinêma

For most of the year leading up to production, Audiard and his team had planned to shoot in Mexico City. Then, in August 2022, when the start date was postponed by several months, Audiard emailed everyone saying he had changed his mind: He wanted to shoot in a studio in Paris instead.

Some of their concerns were practical. It was helpful not to have to worry about background noise in musical numbers, for example. “But the most important thing was that the studio gave me the opportunity to create some images that couldn’t be created the same way on location,” Audiard says, such as a shot near the end of “El Alegato” with a chorus of voices in it. The crowd bursts into a moody piano melody, and the world around Rita appears pitch black and frozen.

But recreating the open-air market tianguis, It created some problems. The team scrambled to build one from scratch, including dozens of market stalls that required special design elements like 30 strings of string lights flown in from Mexico to get the right warm glow. Then there were the dancers: “I thought, ‘Okay, Jacques, you need people in your market, and they shouldn’t look like tourists from France,'” says Jalet. Twelve Mexican dancers flew out and reappeared on stage.

The music in the film combines live vocals and instruments with studio recordings.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinêma

Ducol and French singer Camille first began working with Audiard in 2019, and the songs were constantly revised from then until filming. Because the director simultaneously conceptualized and wrote the script, adapting it from the original four-act opera libretto, he would often pitch a scene idea to Camille and Ducol and ask, “Does this trigger a song in you?” he said. But the “Alegato” scene was always going to be a musical number.

In the lyrics, Camille integrated legal jargon often used in her closing argument. He then used this as a template to introduce Rita’s inner conflict – she defends a man she knows is guilty, but she is also acutely aware that corruption is a nationwide epidemic, an epidemic that underpins every institution, and she feels helpless to stop it. “He blames corruption and he is corrupt,” Camille says. “His singing is still aimed at seducing a degenerate audience.” The lyrics move from the exhausting irony of “This case is such an ordinary case / A case about violence” to moments of chillingly determined faith in his client. Towards the end of the song, he expresses his devotion to his wife by saying “Long live the victory of love”. “Long live innocence.”

Spanish was a challenge in itself. Camille doesn’t speak her native language, but “Jacques didn’t even ask me any questions,” she says. “’You want to do the lyrics?’ he said. and I said ‘yes’. He asked me, ‘Are you sure you can write in Spanish?’ He didn’t ask. What level are you at? Don’t you want to take lessons?’” She worked with Mexican language consultant Karla Avilez to root the song in its specific context, northern Mexico, where Rita is from, with the right colloquialisms and accents.

Saldaña had only three weeks to rehearse before shooting began.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinêma

Jalet says most films that feature dance include at least basic ideas or prompts for that element in the script, but Audiard’s had “absolutely nothing.” That was up to Jalet, who was working on it. Suspiria and to determine which songs contain dancing with Madonna. The director also made it clear that he did not want the look of a standard musical; instead he pushed for intimate close-ups, Steadicam tracking during dance numbers, and a modern, interpretive style of choreography. “I almost quit the movie at one point because I was like, ‘I don’t think you need me, guys,'” says Jalet.

Part of what got him invested was Saldaña, who is classically trained as a dancer and has a knack for telling a story through movement. “El Alegato” in particular required intensive care. He says the first three minutes, in which Rita is simply typing on her laptop, stopping in a store, and entering the market, are “incredibly precisely choreographed, but you can’t tell because it’s just day-to-day actions.” Each word has a movement attached to it, and something as simple as placing a cup down had to be deliberate and timed to the second.

Suddenly, it comes without warning, but this is where the sequence reaches its climax, as the market stallholders around Rita begin making step-by-step hand gestures. While many of the gestures seem carefully descriptive—a finger to the throat for the phrase “slit throats”—they convey an underlying anger. His body language is harsh, angular and almost defensive: “an energy of resistance,” says Jalet. For Rita, there is sarcasm in every move. “It wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t add the sarcasm Rita feels because she knows she’s lying,” says Saldaña. “In the dance, you really feel his disgust, his despair, his disconnection with this world that he has no control over.”

If you look carefully you will see that many dancers are “recycled”; they are seen in different costumes or from new angles.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinêma

The first scene they shot after production began in April 2023 was “El Alegato”. “I told myself that whenever you make a new movie, you have to start with the hardest part,” says Audiard. “So if you’re making a western, you start with a gang fight. “If you’re shooting a musical, you start with the piece that requires the most energy.” They rented the biggest studio they could find in Paris just for the sequence; everything else was shot in a different location.

A few weeks before the shoot, Jalet began fully recording the rehearsals on the DGI stabilizer with an iPad, pinpointing when the remote-controlled market stands would shift in another direction or the camera would rotate to a different angle to do so. it looks like a different street and gives the illusion of a continuous attraction. On set, Jalet had to teach the Steadicam operator the exact same movements.

All of this served to maintain a kind of “chaos and roughness,” as cinematographer Paul Guilhaume put it; This is, counterintuitively, sometimes more difficult than achieving blockbuster polish. That’s why, he adds, the market stands are lit only by practical lights – that is, the lights you can see in the shot itself, which start to flash and fade as the song’s intensity increases – and why the resulting sequence, despite there being two cameras on set. mostly uses Steadicam footage. “We are all very ambitious,” says Audiard. “And I would say ambitious, but let’s continue to be ambitious.”