It may come as a surprise that there’s a movie musical that currently has more awards hype than Wicked. 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, 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” and “originality” 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, 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 for its criminal protagonist. An article in Autostraddle called the film the most “unique cis nonsense you’ll ever see.” Even the LGBTQ organization GLAAD has condemned the film as bad trans representation.
Still, Emilia Pérez’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?
Adapted from Audiard’s opera libretto of the same name and based on the 2019 Boris Razon novel Écoute, Emilia Pérez 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). 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.
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.
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. “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!”
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 of 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” 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.
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 about 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, 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.
The Academy has also shown adoration toward a slew of white/cis/hetero savior stories, like 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 and Mexican populations, 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.
