Review: Emilia Pérez (2024)
This "crime musical" has fireworks galore, but does it matter that the communities it celebrates -- trans women and Mexican women -- dislike it?
Emilia Pérez (2024)
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Two notes before we start. First, it’s been a hell of a month, and this is the first chance I’ve had to write. And second, there will be lots of spoilers in this review, so I urge you to see the film first, because the surprises, both narrative and visual, are worth it.
I started watching this French production — filmed in France, with a French director and crew, but set in Mexico — knowing only its premise: A Mexican drug lord who wants to quit the game hires a lawyer to arrange a sex change that will permanently hide their identity.
Intriguing enough as this premise is, I was genuinely shocked when, a few minutes into the picture, the lawyer and everyone around her breaks into song and dance. In describing the film’s premise, nobody had mentioned that “Emilia Pérez” is a musical.
Rita (Zoe Saldaña), has a steady job as a state prosecutor in Mexico City. She’s working on a rape prosecution, but the night before she’s due to deliver her blazing closing argument that will indict not only the defendant but misogynist violence in general and the whole Mexican patriarchy, she gets a call from a higher-up. This unseen boss orders her to soften her stance and ask for a suspended sentence, because the fix is in, and the defendant — apparently some big shot — will get off with a wrist-slap. The ensuing musical number, in which she dances and sings her way through a crowded urban street toward the courthouse, is an angry feminist complaint against this patriarchy.
And this musical number is fantastic – the element of surprise, the whirling dancers in the costumes of a Mexican urban crowd, the perfect timing of the performers and the crew. It’s a tornado that goes faster than you can catch even half of the details crowded into the frame – a first round of cheers for director Jacques Audiard, cinematographer Paul Guilhaume, choreographer Damien Jalet, the dancers, and Saldaña herself. I had to stop the video more than once in the middle of this rollicking number to rewind and watch a moment again. (Is that good? I was pleasantly stunned, and almost too appreciative. Certainly a filmmaker wants you to enjoy, and to watch again, but perhaps not in the middle of a scene? If I had first seen the film in a theater, this wouldn’t be an issue. What has the ability to pause and rewind done to our attention spans, our appreciation of cinema, our ability to recognize beauty or ugliness?)
Yes, this first musical number makes quite an impression. But we’re only eight minutes or so into the movie. Enjoy this moment, because it’s the last bit of unadulterated pleasure you’re going to get for a while.
No sooner has the rape case ended, with the defendant duly wrist-slapped -- “We won,” she tells her mother dejectedly -- than Rita is seized, thrown into a car, and taken bound and hooded into the desert where, she assumes, she’s about to be killed . And as everybody knows, if this happens to you in Mexico, the question is not whether you’re going to die, but how much torture your kidnappers will inflict first.
Instead, she's brought into a room to face one of the country’s most feared narcotraffickers. This middle-aged man by the name of Manitas tells her not that she's going to die, or that he wants her to take part in a drug operation. It's another kind of operation Manitas is interested in -- one that will have the dual purpose of allowing them to escape their criminal life and fulfilling their never-before-revealed lifelong yearning to live as a woman.
I pause here to bring up the fact that this movie, a French production helmed by a French director with a French primary crew, was filmed entirely in France except for the final scene. This fact, combined with other details, serves to demonstrate to Mexican critics that the film lacks authenticity. I’ll address that later.
Musical numbers continue as Rita takes up the assignment. She travels the world to research gender clinics, settling upon a Swiss surgeon whom she brings out to the drug lord’s desert redoubt for vetting. The conversation between them is rendered as a moving musical number in which Manitas sings of their self-image and their longing to become who they really are.
The doctor agrees to perform the operation, Manitas spends one last evening with his wife (Selena Gomez) and kids. Then Manitas disappears, becomes Emilia, and Rita is richly rewarded. She informs Manitas’s family that he died, but has left them enough to live in luxury in Europe for the rest of their lives. She drops them off at a snowy Alpine mansion. End of Act I.
Four years later Rita, who apparently has been living a luxurious life in London and has had no contact with her transformed client since she facilitated Manitas’s disappearance, encounters Emilia at a fancy dinner. I guess when you are a white-collar professional who deals with the rich, it’s very hard to get rid of them, because the rich have the resources to track you down and demand, like Vito Corelone, that you once again perform a service for them. As before, the offer is one that Rita can’t refuse, and the remainder of the film illustrates the consequences.
Emilia and Manitas are played by the same performer, Karla Sofía Gascón, who herself is trans.1 Gascón is a good actress, and the only one of the three who doesn’t sing professionally; despite this lack of experience, she renders her songs well.
At first, Emilia wants to reunite with her family — her Mexican-American wife (ex-wife?) Jessi (Gomez) and their kids — and go back to Mexico. (The kids, who initially complained about living in a snowy place, now don’t want to leave it, and it’s hard to blame them.) Rita arranges the acquisition of an expansive house on a hill overlooking the city;2 Emilia will pose as “Manitas’s cousin.”
Before anyone has had a chance to get used to this new arrangement, a chance encounter leads Emilia into a new life as the head of an NGO whose mission is to find the graves of the thousands of victims of Mexico’s — including Manitas’s — drug cartels. Dropping her insistence on privacy and tight security, Emilia becomes something like the heroine of the mothers of the disappeared.
The film goes forward with these two threads, the reunification of the Manitas family and the increasing involvement of Emilia in the NGO. When the two threads intersect, a violent climax soon follows.
So, to begin with: Clearly the work of this NGO — finding and excavating mass graves, and performing DNA tests on human remains so that families whose loved ones went missing years ago can hold a proper funeral — would pose no challenge to the status quo. As long as they confine themselves to digging up graves and family reunification, as long as they’re not providing evidence to prosecutors who might try to hold someone accountable for the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent, harmless people, no one is threatened. Neither is the patriarchal status quo, which is always happy to let women clean up their messes as long as they (the men) are not made to feel bad.
So it’s no wonder that Emilia is shown to become a heroine to the little people, who are seen at the end of the movie parading on the street and singing a moving anthem about her (since by the end of the story she is dead) and carrying a saint-like effigy of Emilia in a Marian pose, complete with a Christ-like bleeding heart.
According to an article in The Conversation, this work — the discovery and excavation of mass graves, the identification of bodies — actually happens in Mexico. Certainly there have been similar efforts in Argentina and in Chile, but they took place after fascist dictators were replaced by re-formed democracies, and the work was seen as part of a process of accountability. The situation in Mexico is different; for one thing, it’s ongoing. But I don’t know, and I can’t find anything in a quick search. (If any readers know, please comment.) What is clear is that the film takes a liberal approach, in the sense that it calls attention to an issue that is just one of the symptoms of the problem that has torn Mexico apart without bringing a serious critique or more radical alternative.
That article in The Conversation3 calls attention to other problems with the film. The way the movie depicts drug trafficking-related violence is “sensationalistic” and “reductive.” Emilia’s luxurious life, living as she does on the profits of Manitas’s cartel, is “far detached from reality of most trans people in Mexico.” The role of Emilia with the NGO constitutes a “white savior narrative.” Some of these critiques are well founded, some aren’t, but I was glad to see someone taking these issues seriously.
Maybe I’m being unnecesarily forgiving, but if you can get around the feeling that the movie is disrespectful or is an exercise in whitewashing, you could certainly enjoy this picture as a musical, because as such, it’s quite well done. It might have been better for the director to adapt the script to a setting that was clearly entirely fictional.
What of our own, real situation in the United States, where the advent of fascism makes the historical incidence of fascism in Chile, Argentina, and other countries — of death squads, disappearances, political prisoners, ethnic cleansing — feel like a description of our own future? And might those threats come from a ruling party, or from criminal gangs that flourish in places where governance and the rule of law have collapsed?
This is day 31 or 32 of the New Trump regime. So far we’ve seen the widely threatened arrests of allegedly “criminal, illegal” immigrants and the almost as widely predicted attacks on the existence of trans people. And we’ve also seen thousands of federal workers being fired and dumped on their communities with no warning, as well as attacks on organizations like the CDC, the FDIC, and many other agencies whose whole role is to protect people and protect the economy; without these curbs, and in a newly deregulated economy increasingly benefitting only the rich, we could start seeing the other kind of fascism soon. The kind where gangs take up the functions of government that have been pulled away. You want permission to, say, open a business or build a house? You might have to pay a mafia-like gang that runs the town. You want a vaccine for a newly pandemic virus? Pay the gang — the only source you can access — that offers to sell it to you.
That is just one way things could go. I’m not confident — not unless federal courts find a way to start making the fascists stop what they’re doing — that they won’t.
I leave you with the fond hope that these worries will soon seem silly and that they don’t age well. A future where all that didn’t come to pass. I may not have confidence in our institutions, but I have hope.
In an interview, director Audiard says that Gascón transitioned at age 46. This is around the age of the Manitas character prior to their transition, so for those who are keeping score that’s several authenticity points in the film’s favor. Gascón is Spanish but moved to Mexico over a decade before the film was made; of the other main cast members, Saldaña is American, a child of Dominican and Puerto Rican parents, and Gomez identifies as a third-generation Mexican-American. So nobody is fully Mexican, and this constitutes another strike against the film for people who measure authenticity this way.
I may have missed it, but I don’t remember the film ever making it clear that its urban Mexican scenes are set in the capital. Wikipedia says the setting is Mexico City and I’ll take it as read. Regardless, it seems that only the last scene was actually filmed in a Mexican city, and I don’t recognise the place, so it could be any city in Mexico. In any case, the rest of the movie except for this scene — and possibly the first musical number — was filmed in France. This disconnect between the film’s apparent intent to valorize Mexican women and the fact that almost no Mexicans benefitted economically from its production is part of the controversy that increasingly surrounds the movie.
“Emilia Pérez: the film’s wildly unrealistic representation of Mexican narco-violence and trans lives is insulting,” The Conversation, 4 February 2025.