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[Nic’s Flix] Who is Emilia Pérez Made For?

  • kayleighgreig
  • May 19
  • 9 min read

Still from Emilia Pérez (2024) dir. Jacques Audiard.


Section Editor Nic Chang is back with another Nic’s Flix piece to discuss Jacques Audiard’s controversial Best Picture nominee Emilia Pérez (…and why it ultimately doesn’t work)!


Warning: This article contains spoilers for Emilia Pérez.


I just asked one of the bigger “no-no” questions in film criticism. Why, that is? Because it’s lazy. It demonstrates an inability to engage with a film’s intentions and even unnecessarily puts it down. But in the case of Emilia Pérez, it feels unfortunately valid. Is it made for the Mexican people, only to engage in stereotypes by treating Mexico as purely aesthetic and making light of the cartel drug war through its botched telenovela elements, hence alienating its supposed target audience in the process? Is it meant to be a love letter to the trans community, even though it treats her gender transition as a plot device and dehumanises its titular character through deadnaming, misgendering and constantly reminding us of her pre-transition life? Is it trying to be an ode to women, even though it is primarily a male-written and directed film that features regressive notions of womanhood? Or is it made only for Jacques Audiard himself, a “well-respected auteur” who has admitted to not researching Mexican culture because he “already knew what [he] had to understand”? [1] Only one of these answers makes more sense than the rest.


Before I go further into my piece on Emilia Pérez, I’d like to say for the record that I’m all for narrative risk-taking. In a cinematic landscape dominated by soulless blockbusters that cater to the cliché-saturated expectations of multiplex audiences, something like Emilia Pérez should be a breath of fresh air. If it weren’t such a malicious, inconsistent work of art, it would even be celebrated! But the one thing to understand about taking risks is that there will always be the possibility of failure. Not only do you risk alienating your audience, but it all falls back on whether your creative decisions work in service of the vision you’re crafting. To quote Tatianna from RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars 2, “We all make choices… but that was a choice.” [2]


That quote alone sums up Emilia Pérez itself.


Still from Emilia Pérez (2024) dir. Jacques Audiard


In Mexico City, attorney Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is unsatisfied with her life, always working on cases where she defends criminals in murder trials and her career’s stuck in a dead-end position. She receives an anonymous call with a mysterious offer, whose client is a much-feared cartel kingpin (Karla Sofia Gascon) desiring to undergo gender-affirming surgery. Rita is hired to investigate and consult with doctors to organise the procedure, which is eventually completed in Israel. After this, her client relocates her children and wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), to Switzerland, whilst parting ways with Rita, staging her death and beginning her new life as Emilia Pérez (roll credits!).


Four years later, Rita and Emilia reunite in a charity dinner, with the latter needing help once again. After transitioning, Emilia wishes to reunite with her children, which Rita organises by sending them and Jessi back to Mexico City. However, Emilia pretends to be a distant cousin as an excuse to get close to her family without any recognition (if this reminds you of a certain 90s family comedy, you’re not wrong, and that is actually how the plot unironically progresses). Also hoping to make up for her criminal past, Emilia sets up a nonprofit charity to identify the bodies of the cartel victims she was most likely responsible for, even though she resorts to hypocritically using her connections with incarcerated cartel members to create her organisation, and it doesn’t take long for her pre-transition life to catch up to her.


If the plot sounds like a mouthful, it is. Here is a film trying to be about the drug cartel war and the Mexican legal system, but also about womanhood and trans identity, then about corruption, redemption, rebirth and any other comically vague or universal theme you can throw in there beyond Audiard’s heavy-handed, faux-feminist “changing your life” messaging. Emilia Pérez wants you to know that it’s a moralistic crime thriller, only to swing to being a campy musical comedy, then tries to become a domestic drama, before resorting to being an aggressively stereotypical telenovela, and finally attempting to pass as a bleak tragedy. It wants to be funny, but then it strives to be profound and meaningful. Audiard tries so hard to achieve everything, only to accomplish pure tonal whiplash and a narrative desperately scrambling around for a thematic identity. You can’t have your cake and eat it all!


If we want to dig deep into the core of Emilia Pérez, it wants to be about rebirth and transformation. Each of Audiard’s characters find themselves in a low position in their lives, which they can only change through upheaval. Early in the film, Audiard’s central thesis lies in Rita’s lyrics: “Changing the body changes the soul / Changing the soul changes society.” Of course, he wants his characters to reflect the societal turbulence of Mexico and he’s not being subtle there, which isn’t a problem itself. The bigger issue is that he never establishes stable character frameworks to the point that their decisions contradict their motivations. Emilia’s reliance on her criminal connections demonstrates she hasn’t changed at all, even though Audiard wants you to believe she has, destroying thematic credibility in the process. Even more problematic is how Audiard never attempts to explore Mexican culture and instead utilises elements of the cartel war and drug-related violence as window-dressing for his opera narrative. At best, it’s shallow and misguided, and at worst, it’s genuinely disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands of victims lost to the reckless violence there.


For a film striving to boast its stylistic flair, Audiard’s craftsmanship lacks genuine restraint. The only time the visuals show signs of life is through Paul Guilhaume’s dynamic camerawork, which is in service to the energetic choreography that it wants to show off. Unfortunately, occasional thoughtful imagery is marred by unpleasantly bright lighting, inconsistent framing and garish colours, often transforming Emilia Pérez into a shocking visual misfire.


But disappointingly, Emilia Pérez never commits to the musical elements that are established by a promising, but ultimately forgettable, opening number. Of all the songs I recall, there are only two good songs: “El Mal” and “Mi Camino.” Those have the appropriate catchiness and energy to remotely stand out. The rest are so dull that they feel awkwardly shoved into the narrative. Not only are the lyrics cringeworthy, the rhythms clumsy and the tunes generic, but some of the numbers feel like people sitting and talking in sing-songy voices, with background music just droning on. Even the widely lampooned and misguided “La Vaginoplastia” was entertaining for the wrong reasons. Here, the numbers are forgettable and lazily crafted, more so than the musical numbers of Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux.


The saving grace is Zoe Saldaña, who tries supporting all the heavy, shallow character material on her back and whose experience as a trained dancer provides the sufficient energy for her numbers. With her most memorable one being “El Mal,” she becomes an electric presence that you can’t keep your eyes off of. As for Selena Gomez, she struggles to keep up. Whenever she gets to sing, it’s where she’s most convincing in the role (alas, “Mi Camino”), but that’s because she’s doing what she knows: singing. Beyond that, her performance feels too bland and one-note to provide the right emotional depth. Not even her ridiculously line delivery of “My pussy still hurts when I think about you” can save her Spanish-speaking skills.


And onto Karla Sofía Gascón. What an utter, horrible shame about the firestorm [3] surrounding her because she gives a most authentic performance. When Emilia completes her gender transition and gets to admire herself, it rings true because we feel it through Gascón’s acting. She tries, I mean, really tries to inject vulnerability into her material, despite it being fundamentally ridiculous. One particular number focuses on how Emilia’s child recognises her by how she smells like guacamole and Coca-Cola, and in that regard, she smells like “papá,” where both characters further their emotional bond. To base such a number off an inaccurate trans stereotype (that HRT doesn’t change your body odour when it actually does [4]) and pass it off as an emotional beat is ludicrous, but Gascón still tries to make it work.


The truest shame is how Adriana Paz’s role has been overshadowed (she won the Best Actress at last year’s Cannes with her co-stars [5] and has since received little acknowledgement). As the only Mexican actress in the cast, her performance tries to be a voice for those affected by the cartel war, and she’s damn good, but never given any material to shine. One potentially interesting thread sets her character, Epifanía, up at the nonprofit charity, who’s been notified that her husband was found. When we see her, she’s hiding a gun in her purse. Is it meant for him, or someone responsible for his disappearance? But once it’s revealed that her husband was indeed killed, she laughs and admits that he abused her. As such, Emilia is exonerated of any wrongdoing and there is no conflict. Instead, it sets up an arbitrary romance subplot between Emilia and Epifanía, which holds no weight on the narrative and gives Paz little to do, because in the larger scheme, her perspective ultimately doesn’t matter.


All of this ties back to how Emilia Pérez is too incompetent to treat its subject matter with the appropriate gravity, ultimately failing its characters in the process. They never feel like real, three-dimensional people, but as archetypes expected to go in certain directions that the plot asks them to, because it must for the sake of the narrative. There is little time for these characters to grow because it is too busy trying to hit every target without fully justifying its baffling creative decisions, but where it goes low is how it approaches Emilia’s arc.


Great trans representation isn’t portraying trans characters as perfect people or being better than others. By doing so, you rob them of nuance and relatability because you write them in a manner that never feels authentic. Great representation is making your characters feel human. That means focusing on what they do, what drives their motivations and how flawed they are, so that they feel like us. Then making your character happen to be trans, without relying on dangerously dated tropes, is how you provide that representation.


When you make your titular character’s gender transition integral to the plot and use it as an excuse to kick off a Mrs. Doubtfire-esque scenario, you are painting the idea that trans women are liars. When you keep reminding your audience of your character’s pretransition life and how she uses her connections to get what she wants, you are implying trans women benefit from the patriarchy to some extent. And when you have your titular character physically abuse her ex, claim her children as “mine” and return to her pretransition voice, all in response to Jessi planning to remarry, you are allowing your audience to view trans women as not women but men pretending to be women, and abusive ones at that, too.


Beyond Emilia’s gender-affirming surgery, we never get to learn much about her relationship with womanhood. We rarely get to learn about her experiences with gender dysphoria or who she truly is outside her criminality, because all that matters is her past. There is no character interiority or depth, because it doesn’t matter who she is but what she does to artificially advance the narrative. She is, indeed, a character whose actions have destroyed lives, but by the time we get to the climax, it resorts to dehumanising her identity by deadnaming and misgendering her, all to provoke an emotional response once the narrative reaches its tragic beats. Did I feel bad for her? Yes, but not for the reason intended by Audiard. More so because of how irresponsibly tacky and shallow the material is.


Once you get past the “swings” Emilia Pérez makes, you’ll quickly find how boring it is. Even though it showcases a bold vision, however offensive it is, it is ultimately a failure on nearly every conceivable level. It is the type of Oscar bait that makes you wonder how much dirt Netflix has on the Academy for it to shower Emilia Pérez with this many nominations. There is absolutely no reason for it to get 13 nominations alone. It is the type of irresponsible filmmaking that only a straight white upper-class cishet Frenchman can make. That this can garner awards season recognition while authentically trans stories like I Saw the TV Glow and The People’s Joker get ignored tells you about the grim timeline we’re in. 


Mexican, Latinx and Hispanic communities deserve better. Trans people deserve better. Women deserve better. Saldaña and Paz deserve better. And so do the rest of us.


Still from Emilia Pérez (2024) dir. Jacques Audiard.


Rating: ★☆☆☆☆


Note: this article was written prior to the 97th Academy Awards ceremony.





Endnotes:


[1] ana (@comingsofage). 15 Nov. 2024, x.com/comingsofage/status/1857131110318371064?mx=2.


[2] RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars: “All Star Talent Show Extravaganza” (Season 2, Episode 1)


[3] Vary, Adam B. “Karla Sofía Gascón’s Tweets on Muslims, George Floyd Ignite Backlash.” Variety, 30 Jan. 2025, variety.com/2025/film/news/karla-sofia-gascon-tweets-muslims-george-floyd-backlash-emilia-perez-1236291448/.


[4] Deutsch, Maddie. “Information on Estrogen Hormone Therapy | Transgender Care.” UCSF Transgender Care, July 2020, transcare.ucsf.edu/article/information-estrogen-hormone-therapy.


[5] Roxborough, Scott. “2024 Cannes Film Festival Winners List.” The Hollywood Reporter, 25 May 2024, www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/2024-cannes-film-festival-winners-1235909044/.

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