This was short listed for Best International Feature Film, but it is not a submission from Mexico, but rather from France. It has none of the charms of the best movies that come out of Mexico, nor is it's portrayal of the country in any way flattering.
Its writer-director Jacques Audiard is French, but it is also not Mexican because it was almost entirely shot on Parisian soundstages where the streets of Mexico City were recreated for scenes with an international cast. Even its source material—a chapter in Boris Razon‘s 2018 novel Écoute— is foreign. The result from all these layers that remove it from Mexico is a hyper-curated, phantasmagorical melodramatic narco-opera from the mind of an artist with no direct ties to the land in which he’s chosen to set his fiction.
What it is exactly is a bit hard to pin down--it is a crime thriller that boils over into melodrama, laced with violent action. Zoe Saldaña gives an excellent performance as a lawyer who has become bored with her work, making her a perfect choice to take on a formidable and dangerous assignment: to help a brutal Mexican drug kingpin disappear from sight—even from his wife and two children—and live the rest of his life as a woman. Both iterations of that character are played by trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, who gives the breakthrough performance of the year. Love it or hate it, it is a unique portrayal and story line and I very much enjoyed it.
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