By the time the credits roll, you’re more likely to feel like you were just bludgeoned by a DEI checklist than stirred by any real empathy for its characters.
If someone sidled up to you at a bar, drink in hand, and pitched you the plot of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez — a vicious drug lord fakes his death, undergoes a sex-change operation, and returns as a Mexican feminist icon — you’d brace for the punch line before ordering the raconteur an Uber. But this Spanish-language French musical isn’t laughing; it’s absolutely certain of its own importance — and Hollywood’s tastemakers seem all too happy to indulge the delusion.
I wasn’t expecting The Young Girls of Rochefort when I walked into a Parisian theater, but Audiard’s film felt like the Theater and Latinx Studies Departments at Sarah Lawrence teamed up to hijack Sábado Gigante à la Somali pirates for a Pride Month extravaganza — “I’m the captain now, Don Francisco!” Within minutes, I was wishing I’d just gone for a Negroni and frites instead that evening.
The bonkers spectacle revolves around Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a criminal defense attorney with a guilty conscience who’s roped into a high-stakes scheme by Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a merciless cartel boss. Tasked with staging a fake death and whisking the family off to Switzerland, Rita sets the stage for Manitas’s transformation from feared kingpin to Emilia Pérez. Years later, with a former life buried and now working as a women’s-rights activist in Mexico, Emilia stumbles back into his wife Jessi’s (Selena Gomez) world, posing as a “distant cousin” and blundering through a slapdash redemption arc from crime lord to feminist heroine.
The premise is so absurd that you would think it was satire skewering transgenderism. But no — the film is achingly sincere. The low point? A gauche, fever-dream number set in a Thai gender-transition clinic, with doctors and patients belting out lyrics about vaginoplasties and Adam’s apples. The ham-fisted attempt at inclusivity soon devolves into a grotesque carnival teetering on the edge of self-parody.
For a film that prides itself in “authenticity,” much of its Spanish is butchered. You’d think, with Hispanics driving box-office sales, the studios might’ve learned to get this right by now. Yet certain casting choices make you wonder why Audiard didn’t consider any number of talented Mexican telenovela stars. And why on earth is a Dominican lawyer (Rita) practicing in Mexico? There’s a throwaway line about an hour in that’s meant to explain it, but, like most everything else in Emilia Pérez — from its cacophonous musical pieces to its stilted dialogue — it’s as forgettable as it is nonsensical.
It should hardly be shocking that this vapid tale is France’s official submission in the Best International Feature Film category for the 97th Academy Awards. It’s also seen as a contender in the wide-open race for Best Picture. Hollywood’s current state speaks volumes here and might even shed light on Tuesday’s election result. Among the top reasons that voters cited for rejecting Kamala Harris was her perceived focus on “transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” Likewise, Emilia Pérez seems more intent on flaunting its politics than doing what cinema is primarily supposed to do as a popular artistic medium — entertain.
I’m open to the idea, put forward by legendary theater instructor Erwin Piscator, that acting can be a powerful vehicle for social change, but Emilia Pérez makes for lousy activism. Even progressive critics have noted that instead of giving us characters with flesh and flaws, the film hands us paper-thin caricatures with little to say. Saldaña — a performer with undeniable magnetism — feels completely wasted here, reduced to a passive onlooker in Emilia’s journey. It’s as if the film forgot its own characters in its rush to feel important.
To be perfectly clear, the issue with Emilia Pérez is not that it features a transgender protagonist. Being from Miami — not exactly an epicenter of social conservatism — I can certainly handle a movie at the intersection of Caitlyn Jenner and Narcos.
The problem with Emilia Pérez is that it expects us to take it seriously simply because it has a trans star, mistaking storytelling for gaudy parades of “representation.” At least Tangerine, Titane, and I Saw the TV Glow attempted to thoughtfully engage with gender identity; Audiard’s film shows little respect for its subject. That’s why, by the time the credits roll, you’re more likely to feel like you were just bludgeoned by a DEI checklist than stirred by any real empathy for these characters.
Those pushing this self-indulgent exercise in progressive preening ought to ask themselves what they’re really trying to achieve here. If their aim is to humanize transgender individuals, I’m not sure that “El Chapo — but trans!” does the trick. If it’s political, I would encourage the film’s promoters to take a good, hard look in the mirror and, if you’re less than thrilled with the recent electoral outcome, consider your role in the results. If politics is downstream from culture, November 5 was a full-throated rejection of precisely the kind of politics underwriting this film.
As politically and artistically asinine as the film may be, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Academy feels compelled to nominate Emilia Peréz in response to Donald Trump’s election. You can almost hear the rationalization: “We need this film now more than ever!” they’ll insist, as they pour the motion picture industry further down the drain of cultural irrelevance.
Reactionary politics make for bad cinema, so here’s a better idea: Maybe it’s time, as Frank Sinatra once urged at the Oscars, for studios to “get back into the Mona Lisa business.” That should be the goal — even if films like Emilia Pérez make you want to settle for finger painting.
(Emilia Pérez debuts November 13 on Netflix.)