By CLAIRE WINTER
With the 2024 Oscars approaching, a good chunk of any amount of film media is being directed toward this year’s nominees, specifically, towards one nominee in particular: “Emilia Pérez”, a movie that has seemingly grabbed national attention specifically for being bad. But hey, I’ve liked a lot of “bad” media before- after all, “It’s bad” and “I didn’t like it” are two separate statements. So I sat down, opened it up, and waited to see what, exactly, was making people so upset about this movie. And after watching it, I can confidently say that “Emilia Pérez,” (brought to you by, among others, “Why Not Productions”) is…certainly a movie.
On paper, “Emilia Pérez” is about a Mexican cartel leader who chooses to transition into a woman, leave her life and family behind, and start a charity while trying to reconnect with her children. On screen? It’s akin to little so much as a car wreck.
First, while Emilia Pérez is about Mexican people in Mexico, the entire film was written, directed, and produced exclusively by French people—who, as everyone knows, are the perfect people to write about Mexican culture and issues. Personally, I’d subscribe to the theory that the entire film is just long-winded, misdirected revenge for Emily in Paris.
For a movie that centers itself around a trans woman, “Emilia Pérez” and its characters don’t seem to have a particularly new or inclusive view of trans issues. Fundamentally, it seems to see trans women and their identities as something between a lie and a threat: the titular character, Emilia Pérez, first abandons her family and fakes her death, then decides to ship them back to her while she poses as a distant cousin so she can see her children. When her ex, Jessi (played by Selena Gomez), finally tries to go somewhere else, taking the children, Pérez snaps and all but hunts down Jessi, leading to a finale where both of them die horribly.
Aside from the creepy behavior of the one trans character, the movie seems to regard gender as a purely physical phenomenon. Transition begins and ends at surgery (an all-in-one surgery, at that). The movie’s constant reinforcement of the divide between Pérez’s self pre and post-transition reduces the whole thing to a Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy. This conveniently excuses Pérez in the latter half of the movie of…you know…that massive amount of cartel violence she orchestrated.
Ostensibly, the movie is also about this cartel violence in Mexico and resolving it, which is, again, a subject that French people filming in France should definitely be tackling. Pérez is the founder of a charity for victims of this violence, but without emotion or any sort of regret that might make the audience feel…any particular way about this choice. The plot is inextricably linked with this massive amount of violence and death, but does it grapple with it? No, of course not, because that would leave less runtime for us watching Emilia sing (badly) about how terribly sad she is, for the fifth time, with a Macbook in the background, so we know we’re supposed to sympathize with her. (Either that or Steve Jobs supports cartel violence- take your pick.) Again, the only remotely relatable character is the wife, Jessi, who is all but jerked around by the plot and factors outside her control for the entirety of her screen time.
And although the entire movie is marketed, according to Wikipedia, as a “musical crime film,” the music is…underwhelming. The good songs don’t stand out, and the songs that stand out certainly aren’t good. “El Mal”- winner of the Golden Globes’ award for Best Song in a Motion Picture- is middling at best, with Zoe Saldaña’s decent performance entirely spoiled by the vague sense that someone (Karla Sofía Gascón, evidently) is in the audition room next door, singing very bad opera. Other lyrics are just blatantly out-of-touch from the French writers: for example, when Emilia’s son describes her as smelling “like…mezcal and guacamole”. From what I- as a white woman- understand, this is similar to your American-raised child leaning against you and telling you that you smell like cheeseburgers and school shootings. And then there’s “La Vaginoplastia.”
“El Mal” may have won an award, but “La Vaginoplastia” is the one people would, I suspect, remember in their nightmares. There is something to be said about this song, but I’m not sure what it is. Thematically, it reduces the whole of gender transition and a trans experience into anatomical surgeries (never mind the fact that some trans people choose not to undergo surgery) and is so entirely tonally dissonant that I had to check I downloaded the right movie. It’s also, in a somewhat morbid-humor way, incredibly funny for how completely out of pocket the whole thing is: “It’s very nice to meet you / I’d like to know about sex change operation…man to woman, or woman to man? / Man to woman / from penis to vagina” is perhaps the most memorable set of lyrics in the whole agonizing two hours of runtime the film drags itself through.
I went into the movie hoping to find something positive about Emilia Pérez. After all, with thirteen Oscar nominations, 11 British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) nominations, and a Golden Globe, there had to be something poignant or at least worthy of praise. However, this film’s few positives are quickly overshadowed by its failings.
While it broke the record for Oscar nominations of a non-English-language film, it’s also received widespread backlash in Mexico for being a generally terrible portrayal of Mexican culture and social issues. It features a trans woman, Karla Sofía Gascón, as its leading actress…who is embroiled in controversy over her old tweets featuring blatant Islamophobia and racism. The film highlights cartel violence and corruption, but even as it describes victims “look[ing] the nightmare in the eyes,” it all but divinely absolves its central character of her involvement and actions. (And then has the victims of this violence carry an image of Pérez, former cartel leader- depicted as the Virgin Mary, of course- down the streets while singing about how great she was. No joke.)
As Elle Turner (‘27) said while suffering through this with me, “It feels like all the writers had each other blocked on Instagram…it could contain multitudes if its writers contained brains”. I can’t, in good conscience, recommend anyone watch it, and I have very little hope about or for “Emila Pérez”’s legacy other than maybe for it to fade, quickly and violently, into obscurity.
Featured Image: Emilia Pérez movie poster; Netflix
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