Emilia Perez

A lawyer is offered the unusual job of helping a notorious cartel boss fake their death, all so that they can retire and transition into living as a woman, fulfilling a long-held secret desire.

For a brief moment, Emilia Perez was the film du jour of 2024, a bright and sparkling diamond amongst the glamorous glitterati of the cinema, feted with accolades, and boasting of multiple nominations up and down the board. It was nominated for Best Film by the Director's Guild, received three SAG nominations, five from Cannes, eight Golden Globe nominations, ten BAFTAs nominations, and thirteen Academy Award nominations, the most ever garnered by a non-English speaking film, with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress amongst them. And for a very brief moment, it looked like Emilia Perez was poised to sweep them all, poised to become the silver screen darling of the year, lauded in all corners.

For a brief moment.

There were a few issues...

But if it had not been for those stumbles, it seems very likely that Emelia Perez would have walked away with the big prize that night, the Oscar for Best Picture. And if that had happened, it seems just as likely that, in time, Emelia Perez would have joined the ranks of such movies as Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book, The English Patient, Slumdog Millionaire, Chariots of Fire, or Dances With Wolves, all those best forgotten Best Pictures, films that the benefit of hindsight and time have now made abundantly clear did not deserve the many honors they received at the time. Because the simple fact is, for whatever small charms it may have… Emilia Perez is a bad movie.

And the farther I get from it, the less I like it.

Rita Mora Castro is an attorney in Mexico City when she receives an anonymous call with a mysterious but lucrative offer. Struggling with the state of her life and her career, as well as the reality of the terrible people she regularly represents and defends, she agrees to a meeting. The mysterious caller turns out to be the cartel kingpin Juan Del Monte, known as Manitas. He wants her to help him to fake his death, and then arrange for him to covertly undergo gender-affirming surgery, so that he can then begin a new life as a woman.

Rita travels around the world, secretly representing her client, and consults with multiple doctors in Bangkok and Tel Aviv until she finds a surgeon who, after hearing Manitas talk about the gender dysphoria they experienced during their childhood, agrees to perform the procedure. With everything is place, Manitas fakes his death and begins the procedures, while Rita relocates his wife Jessi and their children to Switzerland, telling Jessi that it's for their protection. Rita is well paid, and she walks away.

Meanwhile, Manitas awakens after all their many surgeries, and begins her new life as Emilia Pérez.

Four years later in London, Rita encounters Emilia, and realizes how they know each other. Emilia tells Rita that she wants to reunite with her children, and hires Rita to arrange for Jessi and the children to return to Mexico City to now live with Emilia. They introduce her as a distant and wealthy cousin of Manitas who wants to help Jessi and be a tia to the children. Jessi doesn't recognize Emilia, but she agrees to return to Mexico. She mostly agrees so that she can reunite with a man named Gustavo Brun, an old lover she had an affair with when she and Manitas had drifted apart.

After a chance encounter with a grieving mother still searching for her long missing child, Emilia, guilty over her own criminal past, as well as having taken her children's father from them, starts using her connections with incarcerated cartel members to create a nonprofit. The intent of the nonprofit will be to find and identify the many bodies of cartel victims, and then return them to their families. The effort quickly grows in size, and becomes more well-known, and Rita realizes that a lot of their donors are the same corrupt people she used to represent.

Meanwhile, Emilia starts dating Epifanía, a woman whose abusive husband's remains were identified by the nonprofit, and everything is good. But then, Jessi tells Emilia that she and Gustavo plan to get married and move the family to a new home. Faced with the sudden possibility of losing her children again, Emilia gets angry and becomes physically aggressive, threatening both Gustavo and Jessi.

Jessi flees with the children.

In retaliation, Emilia cuts off Jessi's money, so Jessi and Gustavo kidnap Emilia. They cut off some of Emilia's fingers, and send them to Rita, demanding a ransom.

Arriving at the meeting place with the money, Rita tries to negotiate an exchange, but a shootout ensues. Just before Jessi and Gustavo attempt to flee with Emilia in the trunk of their car, Emilia reveals to Jessi that she was once known as Manitas.

The car crashes and all three die in the fire.

Rita, devastated over Emilia's death, takes in the children and becomes their guardian. Meanwhile, Epifanía marches in the street singing Emilia's eulogy and celebrating her as Santa Emilia.

Despite some good performances, ultimately, the legacy of Emilia Perez is going to be its controversies. And the biggest one of all has to be Karla Sofia Gascon, as this is the one that ultimately killed the film's Oscar chances.

It all started when a brief and somewhat typical pre-Oscar tiff flared up, where Gascon sniped at the PR team working with fellow best actress nominee, Fernanda Torres from “I’m Still Here," claiming they were unfairly targeting her. This led to journalist Sarah Hagi digging up some of Gascon's old–now deleted–tweets, and that's when everything went off the rails. In the end, the entire Oscar campaign, into which Netflix had reportedly poured millions, sunk like a rock.

Because back in 2020 and 2021, Gascon tweeted several times about her hatred and disgust for Muslims, and how they were harming her home country of Spain. She also denigrated the memory of George Floyd, and also seemed to downplay the involvement of racism in his murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. She made racist comments against Chinese people and their culture, blaming them for COVID. She even shit on the Oscars, criticizing moments of activism, diversity, and inclusion during the ceremony, all while making racist comments about Black people and Koreans. In a nutshell, she showed her ass to the worldd, and revealed herself to be a big piece of shit. Almost instantly, Gascon became persona non grata in Hollywood, maybe forever.

And while those tweets are vile, and Gascon deserved the shunning, it's also very noticeable to me how quickly people jumped on this particular bandwagon. It was very noticeable how quickly Hollywood and the press all coalesced around icing this person out, and yet at the same time, so many of those same strident voices only make vague “jokes” about the Nazi-loving, Segregationist-Billionaire-backed, white Christian fascist authoritarian coup that is currently being led by a diaper-swaddled and dementia-addled serial rapist and kiddie-peeper clown of a man, whose face is always smeared with orange make-up.

Weird, right?

That the little extra kick in the teeth about Gascon being a bigot piece of shit that really rankles, it's the blood in the water for all of the rabid bigot transphobes of white America.

Because given even the barest of opportunities, white Americans will eagerly leap at the chance to hold up shit like this and go: "See! See! Look! LOOK! Look at the racism within POC and other marginalized communities! Look! They're bad too!" Any opportunity they get where they can downplay and distract from the systemic problems caused their own culture and community, they will seize on it, throw it over their shoulder, and take that shit everywhere with them. From then on, they will be ready at a moment's notice to trot that dead horse out and strut about with it like they're turning over a pair of pocket Aces at the River and hitting the set.

Anything that allows them to continue to refuse to confront the fact that their people, their culture, sits firmly in the seat of power, anything they can use that allows them to refuse to confront their own racism, their own misogyny, and their own transmisogyny, it is immediately adopted into their repertoire of ready parries and responses, of smoke and mirrors, and goalpost-moving feints. Because their whole goal, the entire point is to wear people down, to distract, to deflect, and to never take personal responsibility for their words and actions, or the words and actions they allow to be done in their names and in their presence.

So, each time someone like Gascon comes along, and acts like a piece of shit, it has the added shitty bonus of making everything harder for everyone else.

Then there's the filmmakers.

Director Jacques Audiard is a cis, white, French man who doesn’t speak Spanish, and yet decided to make Spanish-language musical about a violent Mexican drug lord who transitions to a woman, and because of this, subsequently turns good. This is all while touching on a litany of Mexican social issues, but without actually saying anything about them, except "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?"

This bald insincerity makes the film all the worse, as it is clearly counting on its diverse cast and subject matter buying it an enormous amount of social cred. And this is all despite it just as clearly not being interested in exploring the myriad of complex realities that its shallow spectacle has raided as fodder for its rather tepid song and dance numbers.

So of course, Hollywood loved it.

Audiard has even stated on multiple occasions that he had no interest in learning more about these issues, either. He just shrugged it off and said: "I kinda already knew what I had to understand.” He has said he didn't feel the need to research Mexico, its culture, its history of drug cartels and disappearances, and then went on to describe Spanish as the language of "the poor and migrants" in a tone as if he were a daring and brilliant poet struck with great insight. This arrogance is astounding, and without even knowing any of it, it's all apparent on screen.

This is probably why the film flopped in Mexico. The lack of authenticity. The undeniable feeling of being manipulative Oscar bait. Well... that, and the fact that the film only includes one actual Mexican performer in a relatively minor role.

And also the fact that the film was shot entirely in France.

Another reason is probably because a lot of Spanish speakers claimed the songs sounded like they were written by a non-Spanish speaker, that they repeatedly misuse words and phrases. French singer-songwriter Camille doesn't speak any Spanish either, but called it "a great language for pop music.” When she and Clément Ducol won the Oscar for their song "El Mal," there was no talk of Mexico or of the Spanish language, it was only gibberish about the importance of their song in bringing awareness to the corruption in Mexico, and how art can be "a force of good and progress in the world," topped off by a cringe-inducing attempt to have the audience sing along with an impromptu version of the song, which went over like a lead balloon.

All of this lays bare how hollow and opportunistic this film is, how insincere it is, and how little it ultimately cares about its subject matter. The film is clearly using the ideas and culture as a prop, a big gimmick specifically built for the big prize... a prize that the film's star mostly tanked for them, so at least there was some karma.

In response to this, Camila Aurora and screenwriter Héctor Guillén added a quick squeeze of lemon to the wound when they created a tongue-in-cheek musical titled Johanne Sacrebleu. It's a film about France that was made in Mexico, and stars only Mexican performers. It was filmed in Mexico City, using performers who don't speak French, who are doing very broad French accents, while wearing very stereotypical French attire. It's such a nice little middle finger to this film and the arrogance and presumption of the filmmakers. I love it.

Because not only does a seemingly large part of Mexican audiences, as well as a large number of Spanish speakers in general, dislike this film, queer audiences also seem to have rejected it, calling it performative representation. Much like how films like Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody were clearly written for the whites and the straights, Emilia Pérez seems to have been written solely to mollify an intended audience of non-Spanish-speaking cis viewers, telling them a story about a vilified and marginalized group, all so they can feel socially aware, but without challenging any idea that they may already hold. In that way it reminds me of a film like Dances With Wolves, a movie that was all about the genocide of Native Americans by white people, but featured a white hero, and all for the purpose of allowing white people to feel good about themselves, to project themselves onto Kevin, the good one, and not the other white people, who were the bad ones. So I understand why some are calling Emilia Perez "Senorita Doubtfire."

It's because, depite its claims otherwise, Emilia Perez is a regressive and toxic portrayal of transgender people, leaning hard into the bigoted lies that drive a lot of transphobic hatred. At one point, Emilia refers to her body as “half he, half she” in a romantic number with another woman. In another, her child sings about how she smells like a man. Her transition is portrayed as an acceptible absolution for the crimes she committed and never repented, as well as a tool of deception, like when Emilia’s “mask” slips when she becomes angry and violent toward Jessi, and her voice becomes more masculine.

Because what the film is saying is that Emilia is just another crazy man in a dress, that Emilia made an arbitrary choice solely for her own selfish reasons. This is the bullshit fueling the bigoted anti-trans rhetoric of the white Christian Trumpers and their white enablers, the lies that claim trans women are just being deceptive, all so they can sneak into cis women's bathrooms, or onto cis women's sports teams, and for no other reason than to harm cis women, or to take over their spaces.

There's a whole chorepographed tune where Rita and the Doctors she is interviewing use the idea of transition as fodder for a thought experiment. The surgeon suggests that instead of doing the surgery, "he," meaning Emilia, "better change his mind," and adds that while he can change Emilia’s body, "you cannot change the soul." Rita counters here, arguing that "Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society." All as they spin and prance and pose, just two cis people singing a debate about the ethics of transness, and all without any trans people present. So fucking weird. So fucking presumptuous.

Then there's the whole Santa Emilia ending, a parade of the seemingly less fortunate, all of them venerating her in the street, which only highlights how much this film feels like lip service from insincere, manipulative, and exploitive people. It's an ending that states pretty clearly that the only good trans characters are the dead ones, because they're unimpeachable that way, because in death, they can be held up as icons, and they don't talk back or get in the way of your narrative.

It's really strange to make a movie that is supposedly about the trans experience, but only pushes an agenda of transmisogyny.

But even worse...

Beyond the huge tonal issues, as it swings between drama, musical, and action, beyond the fact that this film seemingly doesn't see Emilia manipulating and lying to her family as a bad thing, beyond the fact that this is a peppy musical about the many lost, missing, and murdered in Mexico, beyond the fact that this film is about a lawyer who helps a sadistic cartel boss transition into a woman, thereby forever evading punishment for her crimes, and using their transition as the reason why she should be forgiven, beyond the fact that this is a French film, made by cis non-Spanish-speaking creators, in France, about a transwoman in Mexico, beyond the fact that a seemingly endless litany of festivals and awards all happily ignored these issues until Gascon, a transwoman, became the target…

Beyond all that, Emilia Perez is actually just a bad movie.

A bad movie, and a bad musical.

Speaking as someone who loves musicals, who has seen CATS live on stage twice... TWICE, motherfuckers... I was unimpressed with the songs. Each song seems the same, every one seemingly a stomping rhythm, a chant, sometimes whispered and sometimes shouted. Other times, it's a long rising note from singers who are not capable of making that seem impressive. None of the songs are a show stopper. None of them are a bop. I’m not trying to be mean or hyperbolic or anything, but seriously, all of the songs are bad. They’re forgettable. They’re boring. And while the dancers certainly all dance very earnestly, the choreography is equally as unimpressive as the songs. It’s a bad musical. And on top of all of that, the question remains...

Why is this movie even a musical in the first place?

It never seems necessary, and it certainly doesn't add much. Weirdly, while watching the film, it doesn’t even seem like it’s primarily a musical. It seems more like an afterthought, like an idea they just couldn't let go of, even though it wasn't really working out. The general question of quality aside, I just don’t see the value that these occasional and brief interludes of "tripping the light fantastic" unreality bring to this story. Why is this film a musical?

All the musical aspect really seems to do here is to highlight how unserious the filmmakers' treatment of the various subject matters are.

In the end, I really hate that Mainstream America can reasonably hate this film, even if it's mostly for the wrong reasons. Much like with the 2016 Ghostbusters, it really sucks when the bigots and assholes target a project and talk a bunch of their usual shit, and then the god damn thing turns out to actually be bad. Even worse, in a world where Gascon's old tweets had not come up, I can easily see how this film might have swept the Oscars. God help us all.

Messy, insensitive, and all-around bad, Emilia Perez is a film made in blissful arrogant ignorance, one that is clearly hoping to coast solely on the strength of its diversity and inclusion, and that is fucking insidious. This is made all the worse when we’re talking about such a forgettable film that only gets worse the longer you are forced to remember it.

I'm glad that time is now over.