This season, Netflix makes its bid for awards with larger-than-life diva figures and a whole lot of singing. Pablo Larraín, maker of the irreverent biopics Jackie and Spencer, brings us his take on a third 20th-century icon: Maria, as in Callas, played by no less than Angelina Jolie. Also tuneful is Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez, a musical with a contemporary setting that made a stir at the Cannes Film Festival and scored 10 Golden Globe nominations. Both are currently streaming. Emilia Pérez gets points for expanding the boundaries of the musical. If The Umbrellas of Cherbourg took place in modern Mexico and involved drug cartels and a chorus of doctors and nurses crooning about vaginoplasty, it might be a little like this. Let's back up. Karla Sofía Gascón plays a feared cartel leader who is transgender and wants to live openly as a woman named Emilia Pérez. Zoe Saldana is the overworked, cynical lawyer she hires to arrange her gender confirmation surgery and fake the death of her former identity. All goes to plan, the two women become friends, and Emilia launches a foundation to fight the gang violence in which she once participated. But she misses her wife (Selena Gomez) and her two children, who believe her dead. So she invites them to live with her, posing as the cousin of the husband and father they remember. Various misunderstandings result from this deception, some cute and some tragic. The belief-stretching scenario puts a modern spin on old Hollywood "women's pictures." It's easy to imagine Pedro Almodóvar playing Emilia's story for camp value, using it to comment wryly on our expectations about gender. (His 1987 Law of Desire combined melodrama with a sympathetic portrait of a trans woman, albeit played by a cis actress.) But Audiard, who adapted the story to film from his own operetta and Boris Razon's novel, seems to take Emilia Pérez more seriously. He milks the pathos of Emilia's situation — as, for instance, one of her kids wonders in song why this stranger smells and feels so familiar. Emilia Pérez is a mixed bag, to put it mildly. The performances are mostly good, with Gascón commanding the screen with her charisma and Saldana showing an impressive range. The musical numbers by Camille and Clément Ducol are usually catchy, sometimes touching, sometimes electrifying. But the plotting and characterization are all over the place, with…