Every year, there’s a movie that gets nominated for more Academy Awards than it deserves. Last year, “Maestro,” a middling biopic on the legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, got seven nominations; however, it finished the award ceremony with no trophies. Going into this year’s race, it seemed that James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” would be the one to draw the most hate, but it is now clear that the shameful nominee is none other than Jaques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez.”
The film follows the titular character Emilia, played by Karla Sofía Gascón, who leads a prominent Mexican cartel before undergoing gender reassignment surgery and faking her death to start a new life under the name Emilia Pérez. To start her new beginning, she enlists the help of a lawyer named Rita Mora Castro– played by Zoë Saldaña– to move her family away to protect them from other cartel members, as well as to find a doctor willing to perform the gender reassignment surgery.
The climax of the movie arrives when Pérez tells Castro to bring her family back to Mexico. To protect herself, Pérez assumes the fake identity of a secret sister to the cartel boss she used to be, becoming highly controlling of her wife, Jessi Del Monte, who is played by Selena Gomez, and their kids.
The movie racked up 13 Oscar nominations, the most for a non-English film in history. It first received rave reviews from critics when it premiered at Cannes in May 2024, but when the movie was released on Netflix in Nov. 2024, its flaws became apparent.
The film aims high with its subject matter, trying to deconstruct both the psyche of the Mexican cartel and the transgender experience, but it manages to fail at both.
To start, the film does not use its genres to its benefit. It is a musical, which could work as an interesting way to tell the story, but it takes this idea in the wrong direction. Many of the complexities in both the transgender and Mexican experience that one would hope the movie would cover are glossed over in jaunty musical numbers. For example, Emilia’s entire gender transition period is covered by the song “La Vaginoplastia,” in which Castro dances through a surgeon’s building while singing about the various gender-affirming surgeries they offer.
This is not an accurate representation of the transgender experience. In “Emilia Pérez,” transitioning genders is barely portrayed as an inconvenience. The most difficult part of Castro’s quest to obtain gender-affirming care is not knowing what a chondrolaryngoplasty is— as helpfully explained by the song, it’s an Adam’s apple reduction. A smaller movie called “I Saw The TV Glow” represents the gender transitioning process far better. In that movie, transition is represented by allowing oneself to be buried alive and then clawing themselves out. It’s seen as a decision that’s difficult to make, but infinitely gratifying to come out of. It’s a leap of faith that results in a person being the one they were always meant to be.
Perhaps the physical transition process is not the part of the transgender experience this movie is trying to touch on. To be honest, it’s entirely unclear what part the movie is trying to analyze. After transitioning, Pérez moves back in with her family and lives a semi-normal life for a while. When Pérez moves her wife, Jessi Del Monte, back in with her, Del Monte is suspicious of Pérez because she had never heard of her spouse having a “sister.” However, besides that incident, things were pretty normal. Emilia falls in love with a woman named Epifanía, played by Adriana Paz, and Jessi falls in love with a man named Gustavo, played by Édgar Ramírez. When Jessi expresses her desire to move in with Gustavo, Emilia gets aggressive and threatens the lives of both of them.
Following this outburst, Jessi and Gustavo kidnap Emilia and hold her for ransom. It is at this point that Emilia breaks and reveals her identity as the former cartel boss to Jessi. In a moment of panic, Jessi and Gustavo load her into the back of a car. At this point, Jessi feels remorseful for what she’s done and argues with Gustavo about the kidnapping, resulting in the car crashing and killing all three characters. Emilia’s death is a tragic scene, and the movie closes on Epifanía singing her obituary in a sad march through Mexico. This is where the movie makes its point: transphobia is a positive source. It is at this point that the movie’s negative connotation of trans women becomes horrifyingly clear.
Over the course of the movie, there are a couple of conveniently placed “tells” that Emilia is a trans woman. For example, she is once described as “smelling like papa,” which is a nod to hormone replacement therapy, a treatment many transgender people undergo.
The phrase is egregiously inaccurate to how hormone replacement therapy works, that phrase must be featured there for a reason. It shows how accepting the people are in the world of “Emilia Pérez,” not stopping to question her identity.
If anyone had been the slightest bit suspicious of the “tell” and refused to accept Emilia’s identity, potentially going as far as to try and out her as a trans woman, her death could have been avoided. The movie imagines a world where transphobia doesn’t exist, and uses that world to show how, without transphobia, trans people would be in more danger than they’re in right now.
This is a terrible message to have. It spits in the face of everything trans people have been fighting for by essentially invalidating their ability to live as their preferred gender without forever publicly carrying the “transgender” label. It puts the burden of acceptance on trans people rather than cisgender people; instead of telling cisgender people to respect trans people, it tells trans people to accept the fact that others will always be transphobic, and there’s nothing they can do to change that.
On top of misrepresenting experiences that many transgender people go through, the film also misrepresents Mexican culture. For example, many of the characters are said to be from Mexico; however their accents are all over the place, ranging from Spanish to Dominican. The screenplay misses the essence of Mexican Spanish, with the writing feeling like European Spanish with Mexican slang thrown in.
Worse yet, it’s not clear that this movie understands what Mexico looks like. There are apparently only three places in all of Mexico. The street market, the desert and Emilia’s mansion. Everyone in Mexico is either part of a cartel or being attacked by one, and the seriousness of cartel violence is, believe it or not, glossed over through musical numbers.
For example, the song “El Mal” is all about people coming to terms with the death of loved ones caused by the cartel. In the film, Emilia opens her own business where she uses her cartel connections to find the bodies of missing people who were killed. Everyone single-mindedly hails her as a hero for this endeavor, refusing to interact with the obvious question. How does she have all these cartel connections? It’s frustrating to see every Mexican in the movie portrayed as either a murderer or a murder victim, with no room for casual life. It’s unrealistic and tone-deaf.
Overall, there’s nothing to warrant any of the Oscar buzz this movie received. It’s a movie more fitting for the Razzies than the Oscars; terrible both stylistically and thematically.
It’s a shame that movies like “Emilia Pérez” get all the awards attention. Mainstream entertainment is far too sanitized to show transgender characters and cartel violence outside of the gun-shooting, gum-chewing epic action movie mold. The movies outside the mainstream generally enter the conversation when they’re recognized for awards. Movies on a certain topic that are awards contenders become the definitive movie on that topic. “Emilia Pérez” has unfortunately become the definitive queer movie of 2024.
In a year with releases of accurately representative films featuring queer experiences such as Jane Schoenbrun’s “I Saw The TV Glow” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” why is it that “Emilia Pérez,” a transphobic movie, is the queer narrative getting recognition? In a way, this ends up pushing down queer voices in cinema. Luca Guadagnino and Jane Schoenbrun are both queer people telling queer stories, but the story to float to the top is a straight cisgender director’s shallow take on being transgender.
This doesn’t only impact people within the film industry. People are more likely to see Emilia Pérez because it’s being pushed so hard on streaming. Even the people who do see “I Saw The TV Glow” and “Queer” will have more trouble finding other people who also saw those movies. This leads to less conversation about the better movies, and when the conversation does exist it’s relegated to niche communities and groups. A queer person looking for good representation would need to stumble upon one of these movies by chance or deal with the transphobic mainstream. The mainstream discussion of queerness in cinema is relegated to Emilia Pérez, which doesn’t leave room for much discussion because it doesn’t stand up to any critical thought.
Just having queer characters in media was never the end goal of representation. Representation needs to be accurate, thoughtful and respectful to how people are in real life. Emilia Pérez makes no effort to do this, delivering an inaccurate, hollow and offensive caricature of everything it represents. This is the movie that gets 13 nominations? Hollywood needs to do better.
