How Emilia Perez’s opening song “El Alegato” came about

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

A genre-bending noir musical by Jacques Audiard. Emilia Perezopens with a request. Zoe Saldaña as Rita, a jaded lawyer for white-collar criminals, writes her closing argument, asking the jury to acquit her client, a corrupt bureaucrat accused of pushing his wife off a balcony. But the next musical number, a grand procession through the streets of Mexico City, also serves as a call to the viewer to agree, to accept the peculiar world of the film, in which Rita quickly becomes entangled with a drug lord (Carla Sofia Gascón). ) is seeking gender confirmation surgery. “From day one, there was an understanding that if we couldn’t make this scene convincing,” says choreographer Damien Jalet, “we would lose the audience.”

Like the rest of the film, which “swings from telenovela to drug movie to family drama,” Audiard says, the song is called “El Alegato“, which translates as request — does not fit into any category. It is simultaneously a rap and a power ballad, an orchestral anthem and a techno remix. “This bastard kills his wife,” Rita begins in an almost ominous whisper, typing at her desk, her face illuminated by a screen broadcasting reports of the ongoing femicide protests, “and we call it suicide.”

As she walks through the store and back out onto the street, her raspy staccato becomes even more focused. Her tone vacillating between bitterness and sincerity, she begins to write a speech that will ultimately free the man she knows is guilty. The pace picks up and a bustling outdoor market emerges from the darkness, dozens of dancers and market stalls swirling around her while several stand-alone scenes – including one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it knife fight – play out in the fields. “What are we talking about today, right now?” she speaks and sings, and the choir begins to repeat her words. “We talk about violence, about love, about death, about a country that is suffering.”

This is more than a closing argument. “This is the birth of a film,” says Clément Ducole, the song’s composer. And tonally, it was important to set the standard. “We wanted to create the feeling that the viewer might start to think that everyday life can be looked at through this lens,” he says. “Perhaps the walk could become a dance; perhaps the noise of a construction site could become a percussion orchestra.”

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

For most of the year leading up to filming, Audiard and his team planned to film on location in Mexico City. Then, in August 2022, with the start date delayed by several months, Audiard sent out an email to everyone saying he had changed his mind: he wanted to shoot in a studio in Paris instead.

Some of his concerns were practical. For example, it was helpful to not have to worry about background noise in musical numbers. “But the most important thing was that the studio gave me the opportunity to create some images that could not be created in the same way on location,” says Audiard, like the shot at the end of “El Alegato” in which a chorus of voices sounds from the crowd immersed in a moody piano melody, and the world around Rita seems to turn black and freeze.

But recreating the open-air market known as Tianguis, caused some problems. The team went to great lengths to build one from scratch, including dozens of market stands that required certain design elements, such as 30 sets of fairy lights imported from Mexico, to achieve the desired warm glow. Then there were the dancers: “I said, ‘Okay, Jacques, you need people in your market, and they shouldn’t look like tourists from France,’” Jalet says. Twelve Mexican dancers flew in and appeared on stage again.

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

Ducole and French singer Camille first began working with Audiard in 2019, and the songs were continually refined between then and filming. As the director was both developing the concept and writing the script, adapting it from his original four-act opera libretto, he would often pitch Camille and Ducol an idea for a scene and ask, “Does this make you sing?” However, the “Alegato” scene was always intended to be a musical number.

Camille used legal jargon in her lyrics, which is typically used in closing arguments. She then used this as a template to represent Rita’s internal conflict: she is protecting a man she knows is guilty, but she is also very aware that corruption is a nationwide epidemic that underpins all institutions, and she feels helpless to stop her. “She denounces corruption, and she is corrupt,” says Camille. “Her singing is still designed to seduce a corrupt audience.” The lyrics range from tiresome irony – “This case is very ordinary / A case of violence” – to moments of chillingly determined faith in his client. “Long live the triumph of love,” she sings of his obvious devotion to his wife at the end of the song. “Long live innocence.”

Spanish was its own challenge. Camille is not a native speaker, but “Jacques didn’t even ask me any questions,” she says. “He said, ‘Do you want to write lyrics?’ and I said yes. He didn’t ask me, “Are you sure you can write Spanish?” What is your level? Don’t you want to take a course?” She worked with Mexican language consultant Carla Aviles to root the song in its specific context, northern Mexico, where Rita is from, with the correct colloquialisms and accents.

Saldanha only had about three weeks of rehearsal before filming began.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinema

According to Jalet, most films that involve dance include at least basic ideas or directions for this element in the script, but Audiard has “absolutely nothing.” Everything depended on Jale, who worked on Suspiria and with Madonna to determine which songs featured dancing at all. The director also made it clear that he didn’t want a standard musical, instead insisting on intimate close-ups and Steadicam tracks during the dance numbers, as well as a modern, interpretive style of choreography. “At one point I almost left the film because I thought, ‘I don’t think you guys need me,’” Jalet says.

Part of his interest was in Saldaña, who was classically trained as a dancer and had a knack for telling stories through movement. El Alegato, in particular, required a lot of care. The first three minutes, during which Rita simply types on her laptop, stops at a store and enters a market, are “incredibly choreographed, but you can’t really tell because they’re just everyday activities,” he says. Every word had a gesture attached to it, and something as simple as placing a cup had to be intentional, timed for a second.

When suddenly the market-goers surrounding Rita begin to make rhythmic movements with their hands, it happens without warning, but this is where the sequence reaches its climax. Although many of the movements seem very descriptive (for example, a finger to the throat instead of the phrase “cut throat”), they are based on anger. The body language is sharp, angular, almost defensive: “the energy of resistance,” says Jale. For Rita, every movement is marked by curvature. “It wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t add the sarcasm that Rita feels when she knows she’s lying,” Saldaña says. “In the dance you really feel the disgust, despondency and detachment she feels towards this world that she has no control over.”

If you look closely, many of the dancers are “reworked”—seen in different costumes or from a new angle.
Photo: Page 114, Why Not Productions, Pathé Films, France 2 Cinema

“El Alegato” was the first scene they filmed after production began in April 2023. “I told myself that whenever you make a new film, you have to start with the hardest part,” Audiard says. “So if you make a Western, you start with a gang fight. If you’re making a musical, you start with the part that will require the most energy.” They rented the biggest studio they could find in Paris exclusively for this episode – everything else was filmed on another set.

A couple of weeks before filming, Jale began recording entire rehearsals on an iPad on a DGI gimbal, pinpointing when the remote-controlled market stands would move in a different direction or the camera would turn to a different angle to do so. appear to be another street and create the illusion of one continuous frame. On the set, Jala had to teach the Steadicam operator the same movements.

All this was done in the name of maintaining a kind of “chaos and roughness,” as cinematographer Paul Guillaume calls it, which, oddly enough, is sometimes harder than achieving the polish of a blockbuster. That’s why, he adds, the market stands are lit only by practical lights – that is, lights you can see in the frame itself, which start flickering and then go out as the song builds – and why, despite having two cameras on set, the resulting the sequence primarily uses Steadicam footage. “We are all very ambitious,” says Audiard. “And I could say it’s pretentious, but let’s just stick with the ambitious.”