Stunning and Brave...and Bad

My Review of "Emilia Pérez"

The Netflix film Emilia Pérez has been nominated for thirteen Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Just for perspective, my favorite film—and one of the greatest of all time—1950’s All About Eve, received fourteen nominations. Emilia Pérez is no All About Eve. Not even close. Nor is it Gone With the Wind, or Forrest Gump (both with thirteen nominations), and, as Oscar-nominated movie musicals go, Emilia Pérez makes La La Land—a deeply mediocre film, which itself received fourteen Oscar nominations—look like The Sound of Music. I was appalled when Emilia Pérez beat Wicked—a brilliant movie musical that does everything right—at this year’s Golden Globes. Appalled…but not terribly surprised.

If it delivers at all, the mostly Spanish-language, “genre-defying” musical-comedy-crime thriller Emilia Pérez delivers on intersectionality—literally ticking all the boxes for diversity and “representation” as officially mandated last year by the Academy for projects seeking Best Picture nomination eligibility. Hollywood, drunk on wokeness, and doubling down on it as it reels from the Trump victory, will likely heap upon Emilia Pérez multiple trophies, but it is nonetheless a meandering, poorly written, tonally schizophrenic effort burdened by an atonal, amateurish musical score and incredibly mediocre performances. There’s a potentially intriguing premise here that’s never delivered on, due to an incoherent story and terrible script. Emilia Pérez feels like a film that got the green light on the basis of a good pitch. Without question, there are one or two killer ideas here—and a story about a trans woman, played by a trans actress, is undoubtedly “on trend,” but it’s not enough to save this mess. At some point, you need a cohesive story, written well, with a message that makes sense, to produce a successful film.

In addition to being badly written, Emilia Pérez is a morally bankrupt enterprise from start to finish. In a nutshell, it’s the story of a man who’s a ruthless, manipulative, dishonest violent sociopath and criminal, who transitions to become a woman…who’s a ruthless, manipulative, dishonest violent sociopath and criminal. That’s pretty much it. Throughout, the viewer is manipulated by the filmmakers to feel empathy toward the movie’s titular character, for one reason alone: because she’s trans. If Karla Sofia Gascon (who does a perfectly fine but not extraordinary acting job in the film) wins Best Actress, it will be for one reason—because she’s trans. By nominating a trans woman in the Best Actress category, Hollywood declares definitively that trans women are women, because trans actresses are actresses. If she wins Oscar for this reason alone, I predict that Gascon will spend the few years after her victory hunting feverishly for a follow up project, before disappearing into the annals of Oscars history, like many previous flashes in the pan.

So, here's what passes for a plot in Emilia Pérez. At the start of the film, we meet Rita (Zoe Saldana), a low level, under appreciated, underpaid attorney representing white collar criminals. After getting a wife murdering client off, Rita breaks the fourth wall and laments her plight to us. She has no choice but to defend scumbags, because she’s poor, she’s a woman, she’s black…she’s everything that would make for a victim of fate in today’s unjust world. Rita intones a litany of injustice in what passes for an “opening number,” backed up by a vogueing chorus of the Mexican proletariat. Saldana deserves the title of MVP on this project, bending herself into a pretzel trying to make the thing work, with her feverish commitment and desperate, emphatic performance throughout. “A” for Effort, Zoe.

Despite Rita’s lowly status, word of her legal victory reaches Juan “Manitas” del Monte, a scary cartel drug lord. He arranges for her to be kidnapped and brought to his secret lair, where he makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Manitas enlists Rita to act as his operative as he plots to fake his own death so that he can disappear, undergo sex change surgery, and start a new life as the woman he always knew himself to be. Why he chooses this particular low level criminal attorney from nowhere to take on this herculean project is unclear, but Rita—presented with a two million dollar incentive—overcomes whatever scruples she might have (she doesn’t really have any) and goes shopping for a surgeon.

Zoe Saldana in Emilia Pérez

First stop is Bangkok, Thailand, where we’re treated to the most absurd and embarrassing musical number of the film—a quasi-recitative interview between Rita and a Thai surgeon (played by a non-singing, non-acting actor) set in a freewheeling hospital ward where grinning, bandaged-up plastic surgery patients wheel themselves around singing backups, in a bizarre Busby Berkeley-esque number about cosmetic surgery. You really haven’t lived until you’ve heard words like VAG-IN-O-PLASTY and CHON-DRO-LARYNGO-PLASTY set to toneless music and sung badly. Oy vey. The satirical vibe of the sequence appears to be lampooning the factory nature of the Bangkok plastic surgery scene. This is not the high level of gender affirming care our Manitas deserves—so we segue, abruptly, to a more somber exchange between Rita and a very serious plastic surgeon in Tel Aviv.

It's at this meeting that we are introduced to what I concluded to be the “moral message“ of the film. During the sung-through interview in which Rita tries to convince the doctor to take on Manitas as a patient, she intones the following:

Changing the Body Changes Society / Changing Society Changes the Soul / Changing the Soul Changes Society / Changing Society Changes It All…

…Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. I have spoken this gobbledegook aloud over and over, trying to make it make sense. If you can do it, you’re a better person than I. The only message I get here is some vague suggestion that if a trans person changes their body this changes society somehow….which changes…the soul? Whose soul…? Oh, who the fuck knows. This gibberish mantra is as obscure as Emilia Pérez itself: lots of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nada. Netflix’s PR for the movie hails the arrival of self-styled “renegade auteur,” director Jacques Audiard, and his genre-defying “audacious fever dream.” Even their well chosen superlatives can’t help pointing to the incoherence and pretentious vapidity of Audiard’s opus.

To spare you (and myself) the pain of drawing out in too much detail the insipid plot of Emilia Pérez, here’s the Reader’s Digest encapsulation:

The Israeli doctor is kidnapped and taken to Manitas to start planning his transition. Manitas lets Rita know that once she ensconces his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and his two kids in their new life in exile in Switzerland, her services are no longer required. Four years pass. Rita, now living on her millions in London, encounters Emilia Pérez at a bougie restaurant—recognizing, within minutes, that she is Manitas, transformed. Emilia has turned up like a Botox-ed bad penny, because, missing her children too much, she now requires Rita to arrange for Jessi and the kids to come live with her in Mexico. In a bizarre Mrs. Doubtfire scenario, Emilia will pose as the long lost cousin of the dead Manitas—assuming the role of “Auntie” to her own children. See, Emilia—like Manitas—wants what she wants. She’ll commit any deception or criminal act to get it. You know, it seems like no matter how many “plastys” you have, you can change the cover…but the book remains the same.

Jessi, unhappy living under the well manicured thumb of the strange woman she’d never heard of (and never once recognizes as the man who fathered her two kids), begins acting out: partying, stripping, carrying on with a lowlife thug named Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez). Selena Gomez is, without a doubt, the weakest link in Emilia Pérez, but she’s also the biggest name; one suspects her participation brought with it the bulk of the film’s budget. Unfortunately, Gomez gives an immature and one-dimensional performance, of a one-dimensional character with no redeeming qualities. Inexplicably, she’s also the only really accomplished singer in this “musical” but is never given any real singing to do. In need of a “heavy,” the filmmaker has drawn Jessi to be a heartless tramp, a bad mother and a tiresome kvetch, so that we might overlook Emilia’s despicable deception and manipulation of her. After all, Emilia just had to live her authentic self, and, you know…changing the body changes society, ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on—or something like that.

Being reunited with her kids fills Emilia with the spirit of goodwill and kindness towards humanity. She decides that she and Rita should create a foundation dedicated to restoring the remains of the various innocent people who, on the orders of cartel drug lords like Manitas (you know, Emilia herself), were kidnapped, disappeared, and slaughtered. Emilia sets herself up to be some great lady bountiful; a sort of latter-day trans Mexican Oskar Schindler, restoring to families the dismembered remains of her own numerous victims by paying off incarcerated cartel thugs to reveal the locations of the mass graves where they lie festering. This behavior is the moral equivalent of a cat going out and murdering a pigeon, bringing it back, dropping the corpse on the mat, and looking for a treat. Emilia doesn’t do actual atonement for her crimes. She doesn’t come out as Manitas and turn him/herself in, accepting punishment for having slaughtered so many innocents. Consistent with myriad morally obtuse and nonsensical aspects of this story, the establishment of the foundation turns Emilia into an instant folk heroine and media darling.

Emilia exploits her position almost immediately, seducing the widow of one of her own victims. As the dead man in question was—according to the widow, Epifanía (played by the one legitimately Mexican actor in the film, Adriana Paz)—a horrible abuser, we’re supposed to be okay with Emilia’s incredible dishonesty and abuse of power. She seduces Epifanía into a lesbian love scenario. Now, I’ve always been a bit incredulous when I’ve seen films like The Crying Game and M. Butterfly, where trans women get involved in sexual relationships and yet their partners never seem to notice that they’re trans. Apparently, that surgeon in Tel Aviv has some skill with the scalpel, because that (cue the music) VAG-IN-O-PLASTY was worth every penny of blood money Manitas paid for it.

Anyway, keeping her (still legal) wife Jessi and her kids prisoner in her Mexican McMansion, whilst carrying on with her lesbian lover, gives Emilia a new lease on life. She’s not, however, the least bit understanding about Jessi’s ongoing romp with lowlife Gustavo, particularly when Jessi announces her plan to marry him and take her kids with her. Emilia reacts to the news the way a true cartel kingpin would: she assaults Jessi, freezes her bank accounts and all her assets, and has Gustavo beaten within an inch of his life with a warning to leave town on pain of death. The crescendo of the film comes when Gustavo and Jesse kidnap Emilia and hold her for ransom, demanding that her fixer, Rita, release both Jessi’s money and her kids to her. To show that they mean business, they have several of Emilia's severed fingers delivered to Rita. This heavy handed bit of grand guignol, again, seems to be another bid for our sympathy toward our supposedly reformed trans heroine, but honestly: isn’t Emilia simply getting a taste of her own medicine?

Karla Sofia Gascon as Emilia Perez

The filmmakers have apparently bought their own notion that “changing the body changes society…changing society changes it all…shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits,” so we’re meant to feel something when, as Rita and a posse of armed vigilantes are kept at bay by the gun-toting Gustavo, Emilia at last confesses her true identity to Jessi. It’s incredible she has been deceived for so long—Rita clocked her after four years, in less than four minutes; even Jessi’s own kid notices how much “Auntie” smells like his “Daddy.” The light dawns fully for Jessi when she’s in the middle of a high speed getaway, with Gustavo at the wheel, and Emilia, and her seven remaining fingers, crammed in the trunk. Her newly found conscience and instantaneously rediscovered love for Emilia—um, Manitas—inspires her to pull a gun and start waving it around, so—conveniently—the car careens off a cliff and explodes into flame, thus relieving the filmmakers from coming up with a decent ending for this amoral, hot mess of a film. Yet, mis amigos, or should I say mis amigas—they are not done yet.

In the final sequence, we’re treated to an epilogue in which faux Mexican people parade through a faux Mexican street on a French soundstage, in what appears to be a quasi-religious procession in which the dead Emilia Pérez is elevated to the status of…martyr? Saint? The faux Mexicans hoist aloft what looks to be a traditional icon of the Virgin Mary, but, from the sculpted Botox-ed face and plumped up lips, we can see that this effigy is meant to be Emilia. Epifanía—the deceived drug cartel widow whose lesbian lover was, unbeknownst to her, trans and the murderer of her own husband—leads the perverse procession in reverent song. Rita, the new “Auntie,” is left with Emilia’s millions to raise her two orphaned kids and carry on her “good works.”

My one question: If “changing the body changes society” what does it change it to? I’m not sure I really want to know what our “renegade auteur” had in mind. As it is, the ending of this movie made me feel like I needed a shower.

What, if anything, is deserving of Oscar gold in Emilia Pérez? I will say this: the film’s greatest innovation is the portrayal, by a trans actress, of a trans character pre- and post-transition. I’d never seen that before on screen. Karla Sofia Gascon’s disguise as Manitas is utterly convincing, and makes for a memorable and dramatic reveal later when we see him as Emilia. So, yeah. Give an Oscar to the makeup artist. Beyond that…no. No Oscars for Emilia Pérez. The movie is terrible. Its story and message have come under fire from some in the trans community and from many Mexicans, who are offended by its portrayal of their culture and the butchering of the language. The stars of the film have been generating their own negative PR. Selena Gomez made a spectacle of herself in a tearful social media meltdown regarding Trump’s deportation orders which was roundly ridiculed and ultimately deleted. Worse than that, in recent weeks, a series of offensive tweets and racist past statements by Best Actress nominee Karla Sofia Gascon have been unearthed, casting a pall over her award prospects. In a cultural “meta” moment almost as dramatic as anything in Emilia Pérez, we’ve learned that as stunning and brave as she may be, a trans woman can still be a really rotten person; and if, after all the controversy, Academy voters still decide to crown Gascon as Best Actress, it will be solely to make a statement. Too bad they aren’t trying to make it with a deserving motion picture.