Zoe Saldaña is an actress, but buried inside her is a highly trained dancer. This has always been obvious to me; the film “Emilia Pérez” has made it clear to the world. Finally, Saldaña — a devoted ballet student through her childhood and teenage years — can be recognized for the force that she is: an extraordinary mover.
All actors use their bodies, but Saldaña has long been on another plane. She doesn’t just interpret characters, she moves through them with such salient physicality that her body often has as much to say as the dialogue she speaks. Even in the TV series “Lioness,” in which she plays a fierce Central Intelligence Agency officer, her body guides her like a coiled spring — a taut, muscular vessel of strength and sensitivity.
In Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” with choreography by Damien Jalet, Saldaña’s dancing is front and center. And it is a meaningful part of why her portrayal of Rita, a Mexican lawyer helping a cartel boss with gender confirmation surgery, earned an Academy Award nomination.
Jalet should have been nominated, too, but there are no Oscars for choreography. Yet his contribution is immeasurable. The story of “Emilia Pérez” is unorthodox enough; even more unconventional is the way it unfolds through music and dance. The songs’ merit is questionable; they employ, at times, employ the worst kind of Broadway-musical talk-singing. But Jalet’s choreography — sometimes invisibly, sometimes clearly — grounds the film.
Jalet has a partner in Saldaña whose speed and exactness in gestural vocabulary electrify scenes without falling into the sketchy territory of mime. In a film about physical transformation, dance is the pathway for Saldaña’s character to become more outspoken, more comfortable in her skin. And dance has accomplished another transformation for Saldaña, the actress, by opening eyes to her range and radiance. Her precision is stunning.
“The razor blade,” Jalet called her in an interview.
Saldaña discovered ballet in the Dominican Republic, where she moved with her family from New York after the death of her father. Ballet’s inherent discipline — the structure of a class, the repetition of exercises, the discovery of the body’s harmony — gave her relief and release. She stopped, she has said, because she didn’t have the feet. She might have had a career but not the kind she wanted. Saldaña isn’t a tucked-into-the-back-row-of-the-corps de ballet kind of performer. She switched to acting.
It didn’t take long for her to land the part of Eva in “Center Stage” (2000), a ballet movie in which she plays a talented, sharp-tongued student. The film was cast with many professional dancers, but Saldaña was the most believable despite the implausibility of the role she was playing: A ballerina of color on the rise before there were many to speak of at top schools or companies.
Jalet, who choreographed Luca Guadagnino’s horror movie “Suspiria,” knew Saldaña only from the movie “Avatar.” When he discovered “Center Stage,” he grasped that she would take movement seriously. “It was such an amazing relief to feel that, “Oh, she’s a dancer,” he said.
In the original conception, Saldaña had just one dance scene: Rita walks through a crowd in an open-air market, building a defense for the courtroom as her hands and arms slice through the air with emphatic intensity. “In this first scene, she’s rough,” Jalet said. “She has instinct. You recognize gesture, you recognize her power. But it’s also sent in many directions. And there is something not so sharp about it.”
Jalet fought for more opportunities to choreograph for Saldaña, to show her character’s growth. He wanted to make a dance in which she would fully explode and discover a space of freedom. That happens in “El Mal,” set in a ballroom at a gala, where she confronts the wealthy hypocrites in the room. Wearing a red velvet suit, her hair slicked back in a low ponytail, she’s defiant as she interprets lines like “had his partner’s throat slit,” with an arm striking forward and her fingers in the shape of scissors.
As Saldaña makes her way among the tables, her body moves with force, spinning, strutting, consumed by confidence. Her hips swirl; her limbs shoot out like swords. “She’s a killer,” Jalet said. “And that’s the thing — I wanted to use dance in that film like a tool of resistance, like a weapon.”
And Saldaña’s weapon, not just as Rita but in all of her roles, is the intelligence of her body — a body of passion and articulation whether seen or only felt.
Jalet said he could feel that dance was Saldaña’s first love.
“When you start as a dancer, you think as a dancer the rest of your life,” he said. “With dance, it’s like Sisyphus. You can have an amazing show, and the next day you have to start from scratch. You go through physical pain, you go through exhaustion, and there’s always this thing that it’s you. There’s this vulnerability that you bring, a level of power and vulnerability.”
Saldaña’s performance is proof: You can’t hide from your first love.
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