It doesn’t translate perfectly into English, but “Emilia Pérez” costume designer and artistic director Virginie Montel has a theory of mise-en-scene, and all of the sets, background actors, and details that it entails. “Corps make decor,” she told IndieWire. It’s the people, and how they look and move and feel, that make a movie world really real.
Accordingly, Montel was determined to bring a high level of stylization to the contemporary costumes of the Netflix musical directed by Jacques Audiard. The production team realized they needed to shoot the film on stages in France — a place with decidedly different airs than the Mexico City of cartels — and so a lot of work fell on Montel to make the world of the film and each of its musical numbers feel richly lived in.
She pulled from research trips to Mexico, of course, but also looked at the way classic Hollywood cinema and even David Lynch movies use color in an overtly emotional way, directing the viewer’s eye and dramatizing dilemmas the characters themselves might not be ready to articulate. “The decision to make it in the studio, to have more stylization, probably gave us more freedom to build this world,” Montel said. “It’s Mexico, but it’s opera too, somehow. It’s Emilia’s world.”
The initial script for the film focused on characters in their early 20s, much younger than Karla Sofía Gascón’s Emilia or Zoe Saldana’s Rita ended up being. Casting Gascón shifted Montel’s initial ideas, but set off a chain of dominos in a good way. Emilia’s looks could reflect Gascón’s strength from the start, with certain color and jewelry throughlines connecting the character’s experience both before and after her transition. Emilia’s love for rings, for instance, is consistent throughout, as is her choice to use cooler tones when attempting to fly under the radar.
“We had the challenge of Rita not recognizing Emilia when she’s in London. And then Jesse [Selena Gomez] didn’t recognize her either,” Montel said. “But we helped [the audience] to feel that you can find something of Emilia in Manitas and the reverse.”
Meanwhile, with Saldana, Montel constructed a clear arc for her costumes based on what might seem like a counterintuitive source. “She’s like Superman. She’s invisible at first. She always has the same costume — white shirts, gray suits. We cannot see her,” Montel said. “But [later], when she’s on the table with the red suit, it’s completely the opposite. She’s still wearing a suit but the red velvet is very strong.”
It’s that strength of color, whether it’s coming from the featured characters or the background players, that helps animate the musical numbers and gives each of them their own identity. Montel said that some of them look more naturalistic while some are extremely heightened and almost abstract; but she and her team were focused on getting the details right, whether that entailed late-night marketgoers or fancy fundraising attendees. “Every day we had all those people coming in so it gave the costume team a coherence,” Montel said. They’re telling the story not just with “only one person. It’s all the team.”
The logic in Montel’s costume designs is maybe best exemplified by Adriana Paz’s Epifanía Flores, who becomes Emilia’s girlfriend. “It’s an operatic thing, maybe, that she has flowers on her jackets,” Montel said, given that Flores translates to flowers from Spanish. “She’s completely real, but we’re giving her clothes this kind of poetic style.”
That heightened sensibility embedded in the colors and details that Montel chose does, when aggregated across every actor on screen, lift the world of “Emilia Pérez” up into an operatic plane. It’s one that looks visually closer to the strength of the emotions that characters are feeling.
“We often think about how beautiful or crazy the main characters’ costumes are, but [the film works] because we also work on the extras, on the background, and I love it when that’s also an important part of the story,” Montel said.
“Emilia Pérez” is playing in select theaters now and streams on Netflix November 13.
