The Oscar Race Review: “Emilia Pérez”

Sometimes supporting trans rights means grappling with trans wrongs

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order banning federal support for any gender affirming care for people under the age of 19. If followed up upon with actual enforcement, this disastrous action upon the trans youth of America will likely force lawsuits that, if escalated to the conservative Supreme Court, would be a win-win for Republicans and transphobes everywhere. Either the Court forces the Executive Order to shift the covered age down a year so that it only cover minors, citing the freedom of adults to make their own decision but still preventing kids from receiving necessary healthcare, or the government gets official confirmation that it doesn’t need to support trans people of any age in their quest for good health and acceptance.

This was to be expected, of course. Trump, Elon, and their ilk have long been vocal transphobes, often framing their disgust for non-cis people as simply hoping to protect children from dangerous and irreversible choices made out of their control. It’s all bullshit, obviously. Basically every legit healthcare provider in this country is in agreement that not only is childhood gender dysphoria real, there are safe, gradual treatments that account for later reconsiderations of identity.

But it was never about protecting kids anyway. Transgender people of all ages have been a target of scorn and ridicule for years now, thanks to an ignorant assumption that the gender binary is a long held tradition around the world and not something that’s been understood as fluid for centuries. And yet here we are today, with a sitting President screaming lies about drag queens performing unwarranted surgeries on children in between their woke lessons on subjects like “empathy” and “reading books.”

How can those of us sympathetic to it reach people who either can’t or won’t understand the trans experience? Perhaps art could change minds, as it has many times before. What if there were a notable movie explicitly about and starring a trans woman? What if that movie were available on the biggest streaming platform on Earth? And what if this movie were truly highbrow, the result of an auteur crafting an artistic vision of acceptance and diversity?

Well.

If you know anything about the Oscars this year, it’s likely Emilia Pérez. Specifically, it’s about how festival darling and Netflix exclusive Emilia Pérez has scooped up a record 13 Academy Award nominations despite the fact that nobody (outside the festival crowds, anyway) really seems to like it at all.

What you might not know, if you’ve been warned away from the movie, is what Emilia Pérez is actually about. The movie is a dramatic musical set in Mexico that follows a Cartel boss (Karla Sofia Gascón) who enlists a Mexico City lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help her fake her death and medically transition into the woman this violent criminal has always known herself to be. The newly titular Emilia then starts an NGO with her lawyer pal and uses her now anonymous wealth to right her past criminal wrongs. There’s melodrama, there’s tragedy, there’s dance.

In the broadest of strokes, this is not a bad idea for a movie. Unfortunately, I am not here to act as the Devil’s Advocate in regards to Emilia Pérez. A small part of me was hoping that the backlash against the film was a bad faith Conservative effort to raise outrage against the presence of a trans woman right in the center of both its story and production. That notion was quickly discouraged when I saw trans and/or Mexican voices online speaking out against the film’s representation, but I still wanted to give it a chance.

Thankfully, Emilia Pérez is easily available right on Netflix, allowing for millions of people to stream it instantly to see what the fuss is about. Now everyone can tune in ahead of the Academy Awards and realize that it’s absolutely insane that this movie has a record 13 Oscar nominations.

Emilia Pérez is a musical with zero good songs, a drama with no interesting stakes, a “loveletter” to Mexico that doesn’t seem to care all that much about the country, and an exploration of being transgender that ends up doing more harm than good when it comes to social justice. It’s a nigh-on total failure of filmmaking marginally saved by a handful of decent dramatic performances and the occasional so-bad-it’s-good ironic enjoyment.

The subject matter and story of Emilia Pérez are not at all connected to my own lived experiences. As a White cis man who likes movies, all I can offer is my perspectives on the film as a piece of narrative filmmaking, but I couldn’t tell you with any authority if this is a good or bad trans movie or a good or bad Mexican movie.

Thankfully, there are plenty of voices online with those experiences who have spoken up to let everyone know that this shit is whack. I’ll link a couple of my favorites here and highly encourage you to check them out. If I reference this movie’s representation or cultural missteps moving forward, you can assume I’m citing videos like these.

I like to start with the good in any movie, so I’ll begin by saying that when Emilia Pérez isn’t in musical-mode, it’s anchored by a couple of solid performances.

I’ve been a fan of Zoe Saldaña for years now, and though it’s been cool to see her career explode commercially thanks to her involvement in the MCU and the rare Avatar entry, I’ve always thought her pure dramatic talents were underutilized in her major films. Here, Saldaña’s performance is probably the best part of the whole movie. It’s not all that incredible, and certainly not deserving of a Best Supporting Actress nomination, but whenever the music stopped and Saldaña was the focus of a scene, I could usually count on it being a little reprieve from the rest of the movie.

I’ll also give Gascón credit as the title character. I have a lot of issues with the writing of Emilia, but her leading performance was decently good, especially during the scenes with Saldaña. Watching their relationship evolve from one of terror and danger to a sisterhood of sorts was nice, even if the arc didn’t make much narrative sense. Again, I don’t think that this performance is worthy of its Best Actress nomination, but even if I don’t want Gascón to win, I think it’s super cool that a trans woman was nominated at all.

And yeah, that’s basically where the good stuff in Emilia Pérez ends.

Almost every other performance in the movie is anonymously boring, but special mention must be given to popstar/actress Selena Gomez. Even though her performance was almost entirely in a language I’m not super proficient in these days, I could tell it was real bad. Her role of Pérez’s ex-wife (who thinks her husband is dead even as she lives under Emilia’s roof) is an interesting perspective for the movie to include. Too bad the terrible script does nothing with Gomez’s character for the bulk of the film, and when she is the focus of a scene? Yeesh.

You’d think a charting popstar like Selena Gomez would be able to save the songs in Emilia Pérez, but you’d be wrong. This is a musical from the Hamilton school of trying to incorporate rapping into its numbers, and the results are laughably bad. On top of the performances sounding awful, it leads to these strange liminal moments where it’s unclear whether a character is still in a previous song, starting a new song, or just doing a quick bar of storytelling for no clear reason.

One might expect for the ornate, actually sung numbers would be a welcome reprieve then, but again, you’d be wrong. I wouldn’t call any of the music in Emilia Pérez good, and if it’s memorable it’s for all the wrong reasons.

Case in point: the most highly choreographed numbers in the entire movie are a truly atrocious song about the medical surgeries involved with transitioning (“From penis to vagiiinaaaaaaaa") and an awful sounding track about political corruption with only brief moments of decent dancing within it. Absolutely none of it works.

On top of that, any quality in the performances of Saldaña and Gascón are stripped away in these numbers since I’m sad to report neither woman is exactly the most compelling vocalist. They try, but neither actress is equipped for these big showstoppers, and cannot save them.

If Oklahoma! is best case scenario with Good Song Rate (or GSR) of 100% [seriously, that 1955 version is surprisingly good, 4/5], Emilia Pérez is the first worst case scenario I’ve ever seen personally: GSR here is 0%.

If the songs in Emilia Pérez had been good, they only would have served to elevate a terrible script. I legitimately don’t know where to start with this one. Character motivations are unclear at best; we’re told that Saldaña’s character uses her position as a lawyer to fight for those who can’t speak for themselves, but within the first 15 minutes we see her clear a guilty politician of murder and use a crew of cleaning ladies as background singers. The things the characters say about each other just do not match up with what we can observe these people do.

Because the musical genre is all about characters expressing their inner feelings out loud through song, the characters of Emilia Pérez lack any kind of hidden internality. This is fine when it’s in service of a show where you’re looking forward to the next song to hear what a character is thinking. But in this movie, that genre trait becomes a nightmare during the occasional weirdly long stretch between songs. We the audience have to deal with all the negatives that come with musicals and reap none of the rewards.

When Emilia Pérez isn’t being ugly narratively or visually (I could spend two days talking about the terrible lighting in this movie), it’s just being boring. The middle section of the film where the two main characters start an NGO focused on finding the missing bodies of cartel victims is a nothing burger served the long way. The suddenly explosive finale does little to make this worth it. The climax is just as misguided and poorly acted as the rest of the film. At least Emilia Pérez consistent.

Like I mentioned earlier, I won’t pretend I can speak for the trans, Mexican, or trans Mexican experience as it relates to Emilia Pérez, but from what I’ve gathered this is a poor exploration of both identities. The film either gets basic facts about the transition process wrong (there’s a big focus on Emilia still smelling like her old self when many sources I found said that one of the first things that changes about someone on HRT is their odor) or perpetuates harmful ideas about what trans people should be like.

Pre-transition Emilia needs to leave her old life behind and undergo a dozen surgeries in order to become a woman, when in reality there are many trans people who cannot or will not use surgery to affirm their gender and are still able to find satisfaction in their gender expression. This also means that the movie pushes the idea of trans people using gender confirming care as a way to disguise themselves and run from their old life, especially when the title character sees no other option but to fake her death and send her family off to Switzerland. It’s not like Emilia basks in the joy of her newfound womanhood very much; maybe she did just do all that stuff to run away from her family!

Don’t worry, the movie also does a poor job representing Mexico. Emilia Pérez is directed by French auteur Jacques Audiard, and it seems like he did barely any research into what that country is really like before shooting this movie. Cartels, mariachi bands, crowded city streets, desert. That’s it, right? Nothing else to Mexico at all? According Audiard, we’ve got ourselves a complete list of national traits.

You’d think the director would pick up that his idea of the country was wrong while he was filming there, but guess what? This entire movie was filmed in France. On top of that, none of the main actresses (save for Adriana Paz, who plays a somewhat important role in the second half of the movie) are actually from Mexico, meaning they couldn’t offer corrective tips to Audiard during filming.

Emilia Pérez is a terrible musical built on faulty ideas and executed in a baffling way that’s only to its own detriment. I hated it.

It is a real frontrunner for Best Picture at the Oscars.

We should all be elated. A movie with a focus on transgender issues and Mexican culture has a great shot at winning the big prize! How validating for some of the demographics most targeted by our current presidential administration! But no. We’re not dealing with the best case scenario here.

Not to sound paranoid, but Emilia Pérez almost feels like conservative PSYOP. Here’s a movie so bad and so centrally about these issues of social justice that the film’s quality and its depiction to transgender people are inexorably linked. Not only that, but its presence on Netflix means that basically everyone can watch it, which they’ll want to because every major film festival showered Emilia Pérez with so many awards you’d think that a dense smattering of laurel leaves was the logo for one of the movie’s ten million production companies.¹

The Motion Picture Academy might think it would be doing the right thing by awarding Emilia Pérez one of the many awards it’s nominated for, including Best Picture. Its voting body might already be congratulating itself for standing up for trans people during difficult times by giving one of them an Oscar. I am not joking when I say that might be a truly terrible thing to happen to the trans community. Emilia Pérez is so bad and perpetuates such outdated stereotypes that it almost feels like an intentional way to turn the masses against anyone who isn’t cis.

I thought Emilia Pérez couldn’t be as bad as I had heard, but it might be worse. Seek out and listen to trans and Mexican voices on this movie to hear their story. As simply a film enjoyer, I can confidently say only that I hated this movie.

I disliked this movie so much that I wanted to put my money where my mouth is, so I donated $25 to The Trevor Project in honor (?) of this experience. This is a tough time for LGBTQ+ youth, so I urge you to do the same. I promise you, your time and the cost of a month of Netflix would be better spent doing that instead of watching Emilia Pérez.

Rating: 1/5

1. Oh yeah, forgot to mention. The first two and a half minutes of this movie are nothing but production credits. I didn’t know it was possible for this many companies to be involved in a single movie.