Will Emilia Pérez be crowned the winner of the Academy Awards’ Best International Feature category this year? After it collected the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it was hard to attend a festival in the latter half of 2024 without hearing this question brought up, regardless of where one was. But from being called a bad Almodovar rip-off to an oddball Sicario meets Mrs. Doubtfire mashup, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language crime musical Emilia Pérez (2024) has also had its fair share of bad press. Somehow, both of these reactions make it seem like film critics are only recently getting exposed to musicals. Even reactions from trans critics have been divided: some have loved the film, while others have crucified it for being superficial and creating misleading comparisons between the titular character’s gender affirmation journey (from male to female) and the film’s underlying question of whether it is possible to change one’s “true persona”.
Starring a riveting Karla Sofía Gascón as the eponymous character, we are introduced to her as the feared scruffy cartel boss known as Manitas (with the character pre-transition also played by Gascón) who seeks the undervalued lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help secretly arrange her gender-affirming procedures, leave enough money for her wife (a well-balanced Selena Gomez, in a pleasantly surprising way) and two children, and disappear so she can live freely and fully out as a woman. Years later, she is now known as Emilia and once again goes to Rita for help, leading into further entanglements as Emilia wants to repent for the violence in her past, despite it seemingly chasing her as she seeks to erase it. Notably, she tries to wash away (launder away?) her conscience by opening an NGO dedicated to closing out missing persons cases, which ends up meaning recovering the bodies of the tens of thousands of victims of cartel violence. A sweeter aspect that is only partially explored is how Emilia finds newfound love with a woman, fittingly named Epifanía (Adriana Paz), whose abusive husband was disappeared by the cartels.
Audiard’s film is a tough one to parse, beginning with its convoluted screenplay background co-written by Audiard, Léa Mysius (who co-wrote the filmmaker’s last film, Les Olympiades / Paris, 13th District), Thomas Bidegain, and Nicolas Livecchi. The script is based on an opera libretto by the filmmaker, which is also credited as loosely being inspired by Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute (although weirdly enough, it is difficult to find any comprehensible summary of the work online that bears any remote resemblance to the film). Regrettably, Audiard’s script never reaches the level of outrageous narrative antics that storied comedic operas or operettas reach, nor does it sink to any major dramatic lows until its finale. We also hardly learn much about Rita after the film’s opening scenes other than that she, in a song, directly says that both her romantic and professional lives are dead, rendering her essentially just a narrative tool. However, what Audiard has done is very successfully create a work that incorporates themes of repentance, change, and martyrdom by playing the film like an epic. This makes Emilia Pérez have this whirlwind quality that, by the end, has already sucked viewers in and is about to spit them out with its final gut-punch. Works like Sean Baker’s similarly critically praised Cannes Palme d’Or winner Anora do something similar, albeit with a different pacing: the film’s first-half racecar drive is able to make audiences so giddy, and so viewers can ride the momentum almost right through to the very end.
Curiously enough, the most out-of-left-field aspect that doesn’t sit well is how the filmmaker sensationalises Mexico as a lawless land run by cartels and corrupt politicians. (Conversely, the most hilarious aspect is that Emilia’s house begins with a really precarious set of stairs, which later on in the film has a handrail.) This, in part, is so that it aligns with how Emilia is trying to make up for moral wrongs in her own life—Mexico trying to reform the image of its past, with a part-on-the-nose, part-metaphorical song by Rita about how “changing the body changes society, and changing society changes the soul”. However, it never quite lands, and after recognising how Audiard so sleekly slips in harsh generalisations about Mexico that do more bad than good while partially disguised through song and dance, other pieces of the film’s shiny veneer begin to crack. There is also the early-film song that sees Saldaña singing about vaginoplasties (any ensemble made to sing “man to woman, penis to vagina” repeatedly without an ounce of intentional camp is probably a red flag), which already has subtly transphobic elements baked into it beyond its plainly bizarre lyrical choices: reducing the trans experience to a simple “genital change” as if manufactured in a lab.
The film further operates in binaries as if Emilia’s “maleness” is hidden under a transformation. She does, at one point, emphasise how drastically life-changing the surgeries were for her. Nonetheless, this only seems to serve to pacify devil’s advocate viewers who try to slice at trans experience by arguing that if individuals are still trans without gender-affirming surgery, then why should they be performed (or covered by insurance or whatever one might argue) at all? Most strangely (and perhaps egregiously on the part of Audiard), Emilia continues to refer to herself in part as a father during a song, repeatedly reinforcing a connection to masculinity rather than femininity despite Emilia’s confidence as so beautifully performed by Gascón. Therein lies a disconnect between the character that is straining to be released into the world and the one that Audiard has written: she only exists to erase her forlorn past and not live her so-coveted present. By its end, Emilia Pérez falls prey to traps around dangerous narratives of how the lives of trans women are meant to proceed.
The conflict that plagues the film is that, with all its flashiness, it is carefully crafted to be entertaining and can get away with riding this wave without considerable substance for most of its two-hour-something runtime. This doesn’t make anyone ignorant for buying into it—it just means you are acting as the medium is meant to make you react (case in point: if you don’t feel scared when watching horror films, it doesn’t mean you “win” cinema). The film’s operetta-style music works to carry the story along, even if the lyrics are often clichéd and the first few songs start (frighteningly) in Lin-Manuel Miranda territory. Its choreography (by Damien Jalet, who also choreographed Luca Guadagnino‘s 2018 Suspiria ), over-stylised dance sequences, and Vegas-style dramatic cinematographic choices by DoP Paul Guilhaume are bold, fun, and flashy in a way that makes you wish other films also took stronger leaps of faith in those categories. And so, at the end of the day, Audiard’s film might be a matter of personal choice. Can you overlook the many surface-level thematic investigations and awkwardly illustrated characters because he’s able to charm us, even briefly?
‘Emilia Pérez’ is now available for streaming on Netflix.
