A Film Impossible to Have Mild Feelings About
Early in the film Emilia Pérez, a lawyer named Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is kidnapped and stuffed inside a van, with a hood placed over her head. “Are you afraid?” her kidnapper asks.
Rita, trembling and breathing heavily as she’s taken from one vehicle to another, certainly seems so. Yet the audience’s attention is led elsewhere. The camera lingers on her kidnapper’s mannerisms: the rings they twirl on their fingers, the way they nervously tuck a piece of hair behind their right ear. As vulnerable as Rita is, the person sitting across from her seems to feel the same way. The scene is disorienting for its characters and its viewers at once—and becomes only more so when Rita’s kidnapper anxiously confesses, in song, to a desire to transition and live as a woman.
Viewers may remain disoriented throughout Emilia Pérez, a film so aesthetically daring and tonally scattered that it defies simple explanation. Directed by the French auteur Jacques Audiard, best known for his delicately told stories about starting over, the Spanish-language film follows a Mexican drug dealer played by Karla Sofía Gascón who, after enlisting Rita’s help to undergo gender-affirming surgery, leaves her old life behind. She emerges with a new name—Emilia Pérez—and a new passion for undoing the harm she did as a kingpin. But she also hopes to reunite with her grieving wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their children without revealing who she is.
The film shape-shifts to keep up with the aftermath of Emilia’s transition: Sometimes, it’s a prestige narco-thriller about a criminal making a difficult escape. Other times, it’s a black comedy bathed in telenovela tropes. Its most consistent mode, however, is musical: Without warning, characters will often burst into song and dance. Emilia Pérez tells a story about the infinite challenges of self-actualization, and it seems to revel in its contradictions, mixing crassness with tenderness, pastiche with originality, silliness with sincerity. It’s emotionally manipulative. It’s visually over-the-top. It’s a mess, in other words—a spectacular, operatic one.
It has also inspired outsize reactions and heated discourse. Since Emilia Pérez premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where its leads shared the Best Actress Award, the film has been met with challenging questions: Is it trafficking in transphobic stereotypes or pushing trans representation forward? Is it philosophically hollow or sneakily incisive? Yet both the fevered praise and harsh criticism—which have sharpened after the film’s Netflix debut this week—underline the story’s boldness, proving that perhaps Emilia Pérez’s greatest asset is its lack of inhibition. Its very appeal comes from its provocative nature; it baits people into forming strong opinions.
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For more than two hours, Emilia toys with its viewers’ expectations for a story about a transgender protagonist. Rather than following in the footsteps of other notable projects about transition—say, drilling into the physical and emotional aspects of the process—the film deliberately makes jarring, contradictory choices. Emilia finds a touching, redemptive romance with Epifanía (Adriana Paz), the widow of a cartel victim, but she also confesses to feeling as if she’s now “half him, half her,” referring to the years she spent presenting as Manitas, a man. When Emilia learns Jessi has fallen in love with an ex, she attacks Jessi rather than revealing who she is, and the voice she had pretransition—a lower, huskier growl—emerges in their confrontation. Her attempts at freedom, the film seems to suggest, lead only to more pain for her and those around her. But then the movie ends with a song called “Las Damas Que Pasan,” which sanctifies Emilia as a “brave figure” with “marvelous grace” who “filled us with happiness.” The film seems to be rooting for her and against her at once, a noncommittal attitude that’s somewhat frustrating to watch. Emilia’s arc can be read as punishing its heroine or as an attempt to depict how complicated rebirth can be.
Many of the songs are also at odds with themselves. Scenes abruptly change in tone, such as when a sweet ballad sung by Emilia’s son about how he’s picked up the scent of “papá” around her flows into a grim tune about unidentified bodies of cartel victims. And at times, the musical genre of the track doesn’t comfortably match its subject matter: In “El Mal,” Rita condemns the corruption of donors behind Emilia’s new nonprofit organization in a gleeful rap. “La Vaginoplastia” is an upbeat pop song in which medical staff describe the process of gender-affirming surgery in outrageously insensitive terms (“Vaginoplasty makes the men happy,” they chant). Absurdity and earnestness go hand in hand throughout the film, providing a discordant—and disarming—contrast.
It seems that conjuring such discomfort is the point. Despite telling the story of a trans woman, Emilia Pérez furthers binary, gendered stereotypes—as Manitas, Emilia was vulgar and aggressive; now she is soft and maternal. But it distorts them too, in a way that invites its audience to consider their reactions to the material. Take the scene of Rita talking to a doctor she’s persuading to perform Emilia’s surgery. They’re two cis people arguing about transition without Emilia present, making sweeping pronouncements in a duet that sounds more appropriate for a pair of lovers. These elements clash with one another, and the sentiments expressed sound off-putting; I certainly bristled at the lyric “If he’s a he, she’ll be a he / If he’s a she, she’ll be a she” for how reductive it sounds. But the scene replicates a conversational dynamic that often plays out in reality, in which the rights of trans people are debated without trans people actually in the room.
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Given how few mainstream films exist about the trans experience, any attempt at portraying it carries the weight of representation, regardless of its objectives. With Emilia Pérez’s current accolades, and the talent now campaigning for more, reckoning with that responsibility is probably unavoidable. But beyond casting a trans actor to play Emilia (unlike, say, when Felicity Huffman and Eddie Redmayne starred as transgender characters), Emilia Pérez intentionally pursues a dreamlike artificiality that helps it avoid any expectation of offering real-world significance. Audiard shot the film in France, with Mexico City reconstructed as a backdrop in a studio. He didn’t require every member of the Spanish-speaking cast to adopt accurate Mexican accents, making their characters match the actors’ backgrounds instead. And according to Gascón, the idea to apply a simple, pat approach to Emilia’s transition was one she and Audiard came up with together. “I think we nailed it,” she said in an interview, “especially—I remember this perfectly—when Jacques understood that Emilia was inside Manitas.”
Emilia Pérez tantalizes its audience with doubts over whether it’s at all serious about its subject, or an important entry into the pantheon of trans portraits on-screen. I suspect that the film may not hold up well over time, what with its ludicrous lyrics and disjointed tone, but its energetic flair and unabashed audacity make it undeniably exciting to take in. In a way, it reflects its protagonist. Emilia’s every move is an unexpected one, but she doesn’t care to explain herself; she only wants people to hear her out. “Hearing is accepting,” she sings early in the film. Love it or hate it, there’s no denying Emilia Pérez.