By Jai Sibal
London, UK
As the dust settles on 2025’s awards season, no movie has been as contentious as Jacques Audiard’s musical tragicomedy Emilia Perez. This is no surprise. Critical and public receptions to the movie stood in stubborn opposition to one another, with the film winning 3rd prize at the Cannes Film Festival last May, the Golden Globe for Best Comedy, and being lauded with a stupefying 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture; conversely, on notorious movie-rating site Rotten Tomatoes, it has an audience score of 23%. To me, it is a cultural calamity unworthy of praise – being one of the most widely disliked movies of the past few years, people seem to agree.
The film depicts a struggling but astute Mexico City attorney, Rita Mora Castro, who wins a legal case for a high-profile Mexican mogul by arguing suicide. Following the victory, Rita is hired by cartel boss Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, who wishes to transition to become a woman and start anew. The plan is to fake his death, fulfil his longtime ambition of receiving gender reaffirming surgery, and begin a new life under the name Emilia Perez, leaving his past and two children behind. The subversion of a Mexican drug kingpin to represent gender dysphoria and a journey of self-discovery is a twist unforeseen in crime movies. On paper, the plot may well hold the potential to facilitate leaps and strides in trans representation. However, in execution, it’s clear that the film is as convoluted as it is ambitious. Within the first 40 minutes alone, Perez depicts the surreptitious relocation of Monte’s children to Switzerland; Castro’s failing legal career; Monte’s desire for a gender swap; and his once soaring career in the drug cartel. Little room is left for the fruitful development of any singular idea, a predicament which only worsens as the film goes on. Emilia’s attempted reunion with her children, ruses and overwrought twists involving baffling family trees, and the founding of a nonprofit ludicrously dedicated to finding the remains of Mexicans murdered by drug cartels make up the rest of the hour left. The viewer hardly has space to catch their breath – let alone to reflect.
It is clear that the vulnerability of transgender struggle is overshadowed completely by Audiard’s imprecise rendering of any singular idea. With so much going on, it soon becomes clear that more is not more. The film’s treatment of gender reaffirming surgery is insensitive at best, portraying the trans community with a humourless obtuseness. Worse still, many protested at its laughably uninformed representation of Mexico: most of the film is, ironically, shot instead in Paris! Audiard has chosen a cast with not a single Mexican-born member, either, and it shows. Cultural authenticity is thrown to the wayside as the film’s emphasis upon shock value leaves its portrayal of Mexico as being little more than a failed state marred by gang violence. Where a film like Perez should have uplifted Mexican voices during awards season, it worked only to their detriment, even though it’s a musical – and shouldn’t everyone love those?
Bursting into song spontaneously with big, quasi-political and superficial dance numbers (“penis to vagina” sings Zoe Saldana at one lowlight), the movie is a musical through and through, melodramatically oversaturated by flashy camera work. Even here, it is incompetent. A lack of a unifying musical aesthetic and a whirlwind of derivative clichés borrowed from the most banal corners of rock, hip hop, and pop, make the soundtrack seem little more than a desperate and distasteful cash-grab. With Selena Gomez being the only competent vocalist in the cast, it hardly sounds good either! For a film that won the Oscar for Best Original Score over a juggernaut like Wicked last week, Perez does not have a single half-decent original song to its name; what we get is a set of tawdry, artistically inert, and vacuous statement pieces that utterly fail to communicate the transcendence and otherwise unreachable catharsis that musical numbers in rival films, like La La Land, have achieved. It’s a shame.
Emilia Perez is a movie that doesn’t know what it is about. Indeed, Emilia herself can access a new, more authentic life after her transition – but her dysphoria is paralleled ideologically with gang murder in drug cartels, in what is no less baffling than Audiard’s total lack of cultural research. The film’s work on transgender representation is a veneer hiding a lack of substance. There are entertaining moments of semi-intentional comedy, yes, and Zoe Saldana gives a standout performance arguably worthy of her nod for Best Actress. Regardless, the total implausibility of the plot (in short, a drug cartel moving to a transition, resulting in a nonprofit and national recognition for a cartel head turned trans woman), makes any convincing portrayal of humanity impossible. With films like these, advertised to the vulnerable, shouldn’t humanity be at their core? It seems the Oscars don’t agree.
Comments