'Emilia Pérez' is a dazzling but hollow musical crime melodrama

“Emilia Pérez” is an opera. “Emilia Pérez” is a comic book. “Emilia Pérez” is a telenovela. “Emilia Pérez” is a women’s weepie. “Emilia Pérez” is a crime thriller. “Emilia Pérez” is a musical. “Emilia Pérez” is one of the damnedest things you’ll ever see, and I’m still not convinced it’s enough.

The movie is France’s entry for this season’s Oscars; takes place in Mexico, London, Tel Aviv and Switzerland; and features three of the most bravura female performances of the year, all of which won the best actress award at Cannes in May — a rare capitulation to the seismic force of actresses when they set their collective phasers on stun.

What’s “Emilia Pérez” about? Oh, man, I wish I could tell you. There’s a reveal in the first 20 minutes that I’ll do my best to dance around, if only because writer-director Jacques Audiard asks us to swallow this flaming baked Alaska whole or not at all. Zoe Salda?a, a star of “Avatar” and the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, gets to inhabit her own skin as Rita Moro Castro, a Mexico City lawyer in a dead-end job defending wealthy criminals. Early in the movie, Rita storms through the nighttime streets along with an army of the discontented and downtrodden, singing and dancing their class rage. Just so you know what you’re in for.

Rita is kidnapped by Manitas Del Monte, the meanest and most murderous drug kingpin in all Mexico, who has her flown to his mountain hideout to ask her to take on an assignment. About which I can say no more, but it does involve the lawyer jet-setting about the globe, a couple of what can only be called all-singing/all-dancing business consultations, the relocation of the kingpin’s wife and children to a Swiss safe house, and a multimillion-dollar payday in Rita’s new bank account in the Cayman Islands.

Flash forward four years and the title character at last strides onto the screen and into Rita’s life: Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), a bighearted whirlwind who says she’s Manitas’s cousin and arranges for the cartel head’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and two sons to be brought back to Mexico City to live with her. Here is where “Emilia Pérez” ascends to a pitch of old-school/new-age melodrama, with passions worthy of a 1940s Bette Davis barnstormer filtered through mid-period Pedro Almodóvar.

Gomez especially picks up the slack as the neglected wife, a bottle blonde singing her fury into satin pillowcases and eyeing the hot machito (Edgar Ramírez) on her late husband’s payroll. There’s more than a touch of the late, great Barbara Stanwyck to what Gomez is doing — a sentence I never thought I’d be typing about a former Disney TV princess.

“Emilia Pérez” aspires to topicality when the unstoppable Emilia takes it upon herself to atone for her cousin’s sins by launching an NGO dedicated to recovering the bodies of those killed by the cartels, with Rita as chief administrator and a new girlfriend in Epifanía (Adriana Paz), whose abusive husband is one of the dead. The scenes and duets between Emilia and Epifanía are especially touching, the former revealing a tenderness beneath her dreadnought exterior and the latter blooming in the light of unexpected romance. It’s an island of brief calm before the movie rockets to a violent emotional climax.

Audiard is a changeling filmmaker who here tries to recapture the highs of his first two movies, the 2005 crime thriller “The Beat That My Heart Skipped” and the brilliant prison drama “A Prophet” (2009). (I reserve a soft spot for his wayward 2018 western “The Sisters Brothers.”) “Emilia Pérez” is his bid to remind us he can do it all, in this case adapting Boris Razon’s 2018 novel “écoute” into a four-act opera that was never produced and that, with songs written by the French avant-pop star Camille Dalmais, has become a movie musical with shout-outs to Busby Berkeley overhead shots and the floating heads of “The Gang’s All Here” (1943). (The movie will be on Netflix in a few weeks, but it was made for the big screen.)

“Emilia Pérez” is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache. Dalmais’s songs are propulsive and percussive but not very memorable — you come out humming the plot instead. Damien Jalet’s choreography is all interesting angles, but there’s not enough of it. And while Audiard tries to tackle a current social-issue hot topic, he adds nothing to the conversation other than how that topic might alter the emotional surface and temperature of a classic Hollywood women’s drama.

Aside from the fine, full-bodied performances, there’s ultimately less than meets the eye here — just the hollow fascination of style wrestling with the truth of human emotions until it comes out on top. That’s more than enough for a Saturday night at the movies (or, if you must, a night at home with the remote), but for genuine meaning, move on.

R. At area theaters. Contains language, some violent content and sexual material. In English and Spanish with English subtitles. 132 minutes.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.