Emilia Pérez

“Several great movies centering trans characters came out in 2024. Yet it is Emilia Pérez that has soaked up all the awards attention.”

Title: Emilia Pérez (2024)
Director: Jacques Audiard 👨🏼🇫🇷
Writer: Jacques Audiard 👨🏼🇫🇷

Reviewed by Alex Parker 👩🏼🇺🇸♿🌈

Technical: 2/5

To say that Emilia Pérez has been controversial would be an understatement. The musical—or “opera,” as French writer-director Jacques Audiard puts it—about a transgender drug lord has been hailed and mocked in equal measure. The film racked up 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

But for all its sparkly genre-bending and pretensions, the plot is familiar. A Mexican cartel boss, Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), fakes her death in order to transition, live as a woman, and make good … until she’s undone by the ghosts of her past. A mixture of Safe in Hell (1931), in which a sex worker seeks refuge on a Caribbean island, and Seconds (1962), where a dissatisfied banker undergoes cosmetic surgery for a chance at a new life, this tale of transformative escape has been in cinema for almost a century.

What can be considered unique is its form. Of these movies, very few—if any—are musicals. But form alone doesn’t earn Emilia Pérez brownie points. The musical numbers are poorly shot, badly lit, and unevenly sung.

Songs typically allow characters to express internal feelings and thoughts. Many great musicals—La La Land (2016), Mulan (1998), 1776 (1972), and others—go for long stretches without any numbers at all, made powerful precisely because they’re reserved for emotional moments. But in Emilia Pérez, characters break out into choreographed dance all over the place, often when dialogue or plot progression would have served better. The film’s most memorable number, “La Vaginoplastia,” simplistically recites the surgeries Emilia will go through during her transition, as told through her lawyer Rita’s (Zoe Saldana) perspective. We don’t hear anything about Emilia’s own thoughts on her changing body until later.

Gender: 3/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES

Any discussion of gender in Emilia Pérez is inextricable from discussion of how it handles the trans experience. And long story short—it doesn’t handle it very well.

The film doesn’t actually know what to make of its titular trans character, Emilia. Her development is both muddled and contradictory; she talks about her previous life as if it belonged to a separate person, but then the writing implies that Emilia is still hiding the more masculine parts of herself. When she refers to her kids in the third act, for example, Emilia’s voice drops back to a more masculine register. In this vein, the movie flip-flops between treating Emilia like a woman trapped in a man’s body, and vice versa. It seems to put forward that trans people can never really truly become themselves, which is completely false.

Essentially, the movie seems hung up on the question: “How much of a woman is Emilia, really?” But it doesn’t even try to answer its own conundrum. Audiard claims that “Cinema doesn’t provide answers, it only asks questions,” before admitting, “Maybe the questions in Emilia Pérez are incorrect.”

That said, the film does have some merit when it comes to portraying women. Emilia, Rita, and Emilia’s wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) are the only characters with any agency. Men are either bumbling idiots, like a senior lawyer that Rita has to guide through a court case, or fundamentally wrong about Emilia’s transition, as we see with her doctor, Wasserman (Mark Ivanir). By the time we’ve met Jessi’s brutish boyfriend, Emilia Pérez does make it clear, if clumsily, that it sides with women.

Race: 1/5

Freelance journalist Sarah Hagi uncovered a string of racist and hateful tweets posted by Gascón decrying the presence of Muslims in Spain, calling George Floyd “a drug addict swindler,” and complaining about diversity at the Academy Awards, among a bevy of other atrocious comments.

The controversy, which began at the end of January, only compounded the existing complaints about race in the movie itself. While the film is set in Mexico, only one Mexican actor—Adriana Paz as Emilia’s love interest Epifania—has a role of significance. The script gets around this by matching some of its characters’ ethnicities to those of its actors, with Gomez’s Jessi being American and Saldana’s Rita, Dominican. Still, Mexican character Emilia is frustratingly played by Gascón, who is European (Spanish).

Casting with more authenticity would’ve solved several problems with the film, ranging from poorly spoken Spanish and spotty accents. Other issues, however, stem from the script itself, which stereotypically portrays Mexico through the lens of its cartels.

Deduction for LGBTQ: -1.00

It’s a problem when a movie centered around transitioning doesn’t seem to understand why, or how, someone would actually go about doing it. Audiard treats the decision to undergo gender-affirming care as reputation laundering first, and only secondly as a solution to a genuine problem.

In fact, transitioning was originally treated as a joke until Gascón herself suggested that her character actually experience gender dysphoria. Audiard patches in some of Gascón’s feedback about living life as a trans woman, but it’s clear that he still lacks the knowledge to responsibly make a film about one. Blatant mistakes come up, making it distracting, at best, for viewers who know otherwise. In the song “Papa,” Emilia’s son—who thinks Emilia is his aunt—says that she “smells like papa.” However, smell is one of the first things that changes when someone goes on hormone replacement therapy. Moments like this make Emilia Pérez so clearly written and directed by a cisgender filmmaker.

Mediaversity Grade: F 1.67/5

Several great movies centering trans characters came out in 2024: I Saw The TV Glow, The People’s Joker, and Crossing are just a few. Documentaries like Will & Harper and Chasing Chasing Amy focused on real trans people. And yet it is Emilia Pérez, with its backwards depictions of transitioning, and of Mexico, that has soaked up all the awards attention.

This a massive misfire from a director who’s capable of so much better, seen in his earlier films like Dheepan (2015), A Prophet (2009), Paris, 13th District (2021), and others. Many of Audiard’s works examine outsiders trying to fit into French society, and the director’s self-professed preference for making multilingual films works in those contexts. But Emilia Pérez demonstrates an overreach, jumbling together languages he doesn’t understand alongside a setting that he clearly has no familiarity with. It’s a shame that this is the movie that’s earned him widespread attention.

Like Emilia Pérez? Try these other titles set in Mexico.

Grade: FLiFebruary 11, 2025