Some Thoughts on Emilia Pérez (Oh, I Hated This Film)

This musical drama is a big awards season player. It’s also quite bad.

Every year, there’s a film in contention for awards season that I ferociously dislike. Sometimes, it’s a condescending true-life story made to appease white people (Green Book), other times it’s a biopic made solely for the purposes of smudging history (Bohemian Rhapsody.) Last year, I didn’t have that movie, which made the ensuing Oscar race a lot easier on my blood pressure. This year, karma caught up with me in a big way, because Emilia Pérez is truly rotten: both poorly made and ethically ghastly in ways that are winning over so many other viewers and leaving me wholeheartedly baffled.

Directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez is a Spanish-language musical drama about the head of a cartel who hires an overworked lawyer to help her fake her death so she can transition and begin living life as her true self. It’s a pretty gonzo set-up for a story and it goes about as well as you’d expect. Rita (Zoe Saldana) is a brilliant but unappreciated lawyer who does all the work in getting awful men off the hook for murder while her male colleagues take the credit. Intrigued by the offer of untold millions, she is brought to meet this cartel boss (Karla Sofía Gascón), who convinces her that her plan is sincere. Leaving behind her life of power and mass murder also means leaving her wife Sofia (Selena Gomez) and two sons, who believe her to be dead. Years later, she finds Rita once more and asks for help to bring her loved ones back to Mexico, disguising herself as her own cousin.

This is the stuff of soap opera, and there’d be something to Emilia Pérez if it played any of this with the wink of camp or the freneticism of an Almodovar movie. Really, it’s hard to escape the sense that Audiard wishes he was making an Almodovar film, but boy he does not have the sauce for that. This offering is shockingly self-serious, even though its emotions and ideas are rudimentary and half-baked. If you’re going to try something as audacious as this, you need to have some nerve, or at least a willingness to truly push buttons. Yet the final product is safe to the point of regressive in terms of both its presentation and politics.

(Image via Netflix)

Emilia’s arc is basically “sinner to saint.” She goes from the head of a murderous cartel responsible for the deaths and disappearances of thousands of Mexicans to an angelic philanthropist who founds an organization dedicated to finding the missing. There’s never any exploration of her possible complexities and the movie never deals with the fact that its heroine is a straight-up murderer. She doesn’t even seem to view her charitable venture as a form of penance. She’s all but canonized by both the film and the characters, and by the end I was exhausted by this. Again, she is a cartel boss! She’s a despotic murderer whose criminal empire was rooted in terrorizing a nation.

This plays into the film’s backward view of gender and queerness too. Emilia is “bad” as a man but “good” as a woman, and transitioning provides a clean slate for both her and the nation. Whenever Emilia has a dark moment, she reverts to “boy mode” by deepening her voice and getting violent, which is so offensive I don’t even know where to begin. The idea of there being two versions of yourself inside you is a common description many trans people use to explain their identities and I’m not discounting that, but in Emilia Pérez, it’s a big honking excuse to ignore the moral failing of its own story. Oh, all of those dead bodies we’re digging up? Well, she didn’t kill any of them? That was the other person.

It doesn’t help that the movie is filling up the bingo card of outdated trans trends in pop culture. In their very first scene together, Rita literally gasps with unconcealed disgust when Emilia, pre-transition, opens her shirt to show she's serious about transitioning. We don't see what we can assume are a pair of breasts she's grown from two years of hormone treatment, but the film sees this reveal as something so shocking and almost gruesome. In a later scene, after she's had head-to-toe surgery, Emilia looks at her vagina with a pocket mirror. You know, it's not the law to include that moment of total fantasy in every trans movie written by cis people.

This hindrance of Emilia’s arc also limits the performances of its cast. The main four women received the Best Actress honours at the Cannes Film Festival this year, and I’m not sure why. It’s not that any of them are bad, but it felt like they were directed to be as bland as possible (this is often an issue of a director working in a language that isn’t their first, but he did a great job with 2018’s The Sisters Brothers, so who knows?) Karla Sofía Gascón plays Emilia (and at least the film doesn’t cast a man to play her pre-transition), and she seems to have mostly been told to be scary and growly in pre-transition scenes, then kind and loving in the rest. She has a few affecting scenes, like when she puts one of her sons to bed, but she’s fighting against a confused and messy film. It’s exacerbated by the fact that she can’t sing and she’s called upon to do a lot of that. Zoe Saldana fares better, if only because her character isn’t expected to be so perfect. Selena Gomez is stuck in the wife role and while her singing is better, the character isn’t. She’s shunted with some truly terrible dialogue and seems lost by the climax.

(Image via Netflix.)

All that and it’s a terrible musical! All of the songs are bad, the staging is muddled, the choreography feels rushed, and most of the cast can’t sing. I get that the idea of the acting mattering more than the vocal quality is a common defence for movie musicals (I survived Les Misérables) but it’s an increasingly contrived excuse. I think Audiard was aiming for something like Leos Carax’s Annette but that film not only had music by Sparks, it was rooted in a world of operatic ideas. I’ve no idea why Emilia Pérez is a musical. It doesn’t add anything to the characters or story. It’s either distracting, cheap, or laughable, such as a scene where Saldana is forced to have a pointless sing-off across the table with a surgeon. The only number that truly works is one set at a gala hosted by Emilia where the nation’s rich, famous, and corrupt are there to offer her money to solve the problems they helped to create.

I can see why so many people have rhapsodized to the heavens about this movie. It’s flashy, female-fronted, and always distracting. But I do not understand the claims that it is audacious or brave. We have too many amazing trans filmmakers doing exceptional work right now for this to ever be labelled as boundary-pushing. A braver film would have been more willing to tackle the entanglement of political and moral chaos caused by having a cartel boss as its heroine. This is a film masquerading as progressive while avoiding any of the actual work of being so. Watch it win a ton of Oscars. It’s exhausting.

Emilia Pérez is playing in limited theatres in the UK now. It is set to receive a limited theatrical release in the United States and Canada on November 1 and will premiere on Netflix on November 13.