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PORTSIDE CULTURE

EMILIA PÉREZ IS A REGRESSIVE MOVIE THAT THINKS IT’S WOKE. IT WILL
PROBABLY WIN AN OSCAR.  
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Kyndall Cunningham
December 13, 2024
Vox
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_ Could a movie musical about a trans Mexican drug lord be this
awards season’s Crash? _

Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Pérez in Emilia Pérez. , Page
114/Why Not Productions/Pathé Films/France 2 Cinéma

 

Kyndall Cunningham
[[link removed]] is a culture writer
interested in reality TV, movies, pop music, Black media, and
celebrity culture. Previously, she wrote for the Daily Beast and
contributed to several publications, including Vulture, W Magazine,
and Bitch Media.

_____

It may come as a surprise that there’s a movie musical that
currently has more awards hype than _Wicked_
[[link removed]]. _Emilia
Pérez_ quietly landed on Netflix last month (and_, _a bit more
loudly, film buffs on X) after making a huge splash at this year’s
Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize and the first Best
Actress Award for an ensemble. Earlier this week, the Jacques Audiard
film received 10 Golden Globes nominations
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the most for a film this year, including Best Picture — Musical or
Comedy. For an awards race that’s still up in the air, the musical
seems to be among the most locked in.

But is _Emilia Pérez_ — a film about a cartel leader who gets
gender-affirming surgery and escapes a life of crime — actually
good?

As with many stories mining the grim realities of oppressed
communities, critics and awards bodies have rushed to praise the
“avant garde” film for exploring trans identity and Mexico’s
drug war. Glowing reviews have lauded the “bravery
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and “originality
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of French filmmaker Audiard in centering underrepresented characters
and delivering “provocative” subject matter through a trippy,
Spanish-language musical. Meanwhile, the general public, at
least according to Letterboxd
[[link removed]], is less high
on the film, and many queer critics are concerned if not completely
baffled by its existence.

In a story for The Cut, writer Harron Walker criticized _Emilia
Pérez_’s use of trans identity as an “inherently redemptive”
tool
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its criminal protagonist. An article in Autostraddle
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film the most “unique cis nonsense you’ll ever see.” Even the
LGBTQ organization GLAAD has condemned
[[link removed]] the
film as bad trans representation.

Still, _Emilia Pé_rez’s presence in the Oscars race isn’t
exactly a shock, given that it falls neatly into a category of movies
the white Hollywood establishment loves to celebrate: mawkish stories
about people on society’s margins that allow viewers to feel
socially aware through their consumption, without challenging of any
of the stereotypes and political messaging presented in them.
Could _Emilia Pérez_ become this year’s _Crash_?
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WHAT EXACTLY IS _EMILIA PÉREZ_?

Adapted from Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name and based on
the 2019 Boris Razon novel _Écoute_, _Emilia Pé_rez is
essentially a rock musical about three Mexican women whose lives are
upended when one of them, Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), decides to
transition. The film begins with Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a Dominican
defense lawyer exhausted by Mexico’s corrupt, misogynist legal
system. After getting a prominent media figure off the hook for
murdering his wife, she’s kidnapped by Emilia (then known as
“Manitas”), who enlists Rita to help her escape the cartel in
exchange for a large sum of cash.

This exit strategy mainly entails transitioning. It’s a desire
Emilia’s had since she was a child but is curiously employed as a
way to help her avoid accountability for her crimes. Rita reluctantly
agrees, arranging for Emilia to get numerous gender-affirming
surgeries, which are somehow all performed at once (typically, such
procedures are done over time
[[link removed].]).
She also relocates Emilia’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two
sons. Years later, when Emilia decides she wants to be reunited with
Jessi and her children, she has Rita bring them back to Mexico City to
share a house with her under the guise that she’s her children’s
aunt chosen to look after them. Feeling guilt about her past criminal
life, she recruits Rita for another venture, a nonprofit that
identifies the bodies of cartel victims and notifies their families.

[Actress and singer Selena Gomez as Jessi Del Monte in the Netflix
movie musical Emilia Pérez.]
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Selena Gomez as Jessi Del Monte in _Emilia Pérez_.

 Page 114/Why Not Productions/Pathé Films/France 2 Cinéma

If that isn’t enough plot, the lives of these characters become even
more chaotic, violent, and ultimately tragic thanks to Emilia’s
uncontrolled and selfish impulses. A more delicate movie would zoom in
on Emilia’s psyche as she’s navigating her desires and conflicting
ethics. Instead, audiences are left to gawk at the wreckage.

A “PROGRESSIVE” MOVIE WITH REGRESSIVE TROPES

Despite Gascón’s attempts to add some charm to the role, Emilia is
written as a ridiculous if not totally loathsome character, with
Audiard using her trans identity as a narrative shield for her
behavior instead of engaging with her as a full human being.
Perfunctory attempts to portray Emilia in an empathetic light don’t
really balance out with the upheaval her character causes throughout
the film.

“A lot of these issues stem from adapting a chapter that is
explicitly about a cartel leader using transition as a means of
escape,” says critic Juan Barquin, who reviewed _Emilia
Pérez_ for Little White Lies
[[link removed]]. “You realize that you
might get accused of being transphobic, so you try to smooth it over
by hiring a trans actress and revising certain beats without looking
at how other parts of the script reflect transness negatively.”

In_ Emilia Pérez_, Audiard makes some effort to inform the audience
of Emilia’s lifelong dreams of womanhood. This is a modification
from the chapter of Razon’s novel that the film is based on,
according to Barquin, where a drug trafficker solely transitions to
escape the cartel, modeling herself after her first love.

Even with Audiard’s perfunctory attempts to validate Emilia’s
gender identity, it’s largely played as a disguise throughout the
movie. Moments of Emilia’s “mask” slipping around her family
feel like scenes ripped out of _Tootsie_ or _Mrs. Doubtfire_. When
she becomes angry and violent toward Jessi, her voice reverts back to
a deep, gravelly tone. There’s not much separating this portrayal
from harmful anti-trans rhetoric that suggests trans women are
deceptive actors who pose harm to cis women.

Barquin also notes that the movie’s engagement with transness is
solely focused on the “external change of medical transition,” as
well as presenting only two sex options, male and female. These flaws
are best encapsulated in a silly, Busby Berekley-inspired number
(“La vaginoplastia”) where a plastic surgeon lists for Rita all
the gender-affirming procedures available to Emilia. In a viral moment
from the sequence, he blandly sings, “Man to woman, penis to
vagina!”

[Actress Zoe Saldaña in a red velvet suit while dancing dramatically
in a dark restaurant.]
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Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora Castro in _Emilia Pérez._

 Page 114/Why Not Productions/Pathé Films/France 2 Cinéma

_Emilia Pérez_’s depiction of Mexican culture feels equally
regressive and lazy. Mexico is presented as an inescapably violent and
miserable place. Meanwhile, references to a character’s Mexican
identity include smelling like tequila and guacamole. Little effort
was seemingly put into ensuring that the film’s language was spoken
properly. This has resulted in criticism
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Gomez.

“She just sounds like she doesn’t actually understand what she’s
saying, which arguably extends to the director who doesn’t actually
understand the language either,” says Barquin.

For a supposedly unconventional tale, the movie doesn’t challenge
any of the stereotypical narratives about the drug trade that are
already rampant in popular Western media and politics. These
“narco-narratives
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fail to encapsulate the nuances of the drug trade, particularly the
political role of the Global North, and exaggerate the authority of
drug traffickers in Mexico. Instead, the film relishes in this
violence, using it to portray both “realism” and melodrama. By the
time the movie ends with a climactic shootout, audiences will have
seen it coming.

_EMILIA PÉREZ_ IS THE MOST STEREOTYPICAL OSCAR MOVIE

If history is any predictor, all these issues make _Emilia Pérez_ a
huge threat come Oscar nominations next month. If it gets the kind of
nominations it received from the Globes, it’s particularly likely to
pick up some awards at the ceremony. It’s become a trope of the
Oscars that, every few years, a thoughtless movie tackling
“important issues” becomes a favorite among Academy voters, who
pat themselves on the back for celebrating what they believe to be
diversity and political art in an extremely whitewashed industry.

Movies in this questionably political category tend to feature othered
people dealing with some melodramatic version of struggle. Danny
Boyle’s 2008 film _Slumdog Millionaire _took home eight Oscars,
including Best Picture, while facing intense backlash from critics in
India
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how it represented urban poverty in the country, as well as the
Academy’s reluctance to celebrate movies by Indian filmmakers.
Sometimes, they’re clunky messages about tolerance that inevitably
focus more on the arc of the privileged characters. 2019’s Best
Picture winner _Green Book_
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a reverse _Driving Miss Daisy_, has become recently infamous in this
regard. Sometimes, they’re ham-fisted allegories about racism like
Best Action Short winner _Skin_
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The Academy has also shown adoration toward a slew
of white/cis/hetero savior stories
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2009’s _The Blind Side_, about a white family that adopts NFL
player Michael Oher, and 2011’s _The Help_, about a white woman
(Emma Stone) who publishes the stories of Black domestic workers in
the Jim Crow South. 2013’s _Dallas Buyers Club_, where an anti-gay
cowboy diagnosed with HIV/AIDS illegally gets other patients access to
medicine, also folds into this Academy narrative.

The convoluted messaging of_ Emilia Pérez_ is maybe most
reminiscent of 2005’s Best Picture winner _Crash_. The Paul Haggis
movie, which controversially beat _Brokeback Mountain_, attempted to
expose the layers of prejudice in a post-9/11 Los Angeles. The problem
was, it had no idea how racism actually functions in society,
flattening the country’s systemic racial division to personal
pettiness. _Emilia Pérez_ is an equally reductive look at trans and
Latino/Latina identity with no idea of what it wants to say about its
desolate characters. Instead, it offers a lot of confusion and hardly
any compassion.

Under a soon-to-be president who gained power in American politics
partly by attacking trans
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populations [[link removed]], it will be
interesting to see whether there will be more rigorous engagement
with _Emilia Pérez_ throughout awards season. As history has shown,
though, it’s more convenient for Hollywood’s awards bodies to
celebrate whatever “diverse” offering falls in their lap first,
often leaving the most insightful stories about underrepresented
people unnoticed. For now, _Emilia Pérez _seems like an ideal pick
for Best Picture: tragic, brave, and deeply out of touch.

* Emilia Pérez
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* NETFLIX
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* Mexico Drug Wars
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* narcotics
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* Mexican Drug Cartels
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* LGBTQ
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