Trying To Save Emilia Pérez From Itself

On Jacques Audiard's 'Emilia Pérez'

Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez, 2024

The Metropolitan Review continues to respond to Oscar cheer with….sourness. Jessa Crispin, long-time editor/proprietress of the great book culture site Bookslut, writes on Emilia Pérez. If you enjoy what TMR is producing, please consider pledging $50 a year or $5 a month.

-The Editors

When a film has been widely condemned and derided, it can create within one an illogical hope that the movie is actually good. And I, the genius, am the only one to see its goodness and I will bravely present my contrarian take and convince everyone they have been wrong.

I was kind of hoping this would be true for Emilia Pérez, but about ten minutes into the film I realized this was unlikely to work out, and what I would be left restating was everyone has said. Emilia Pérez! What the fuck?!

Let’s just get some stuff out of the way. It’s the story of a violent Mexican narco who fakes his death, goes to Israel for surgery to transition as a woman, attempts to regain a connection to her children, and tries to atone for her past by establishing a nonprofit to help those whose lives have been impacted by narco violence. It’s a French production set in Mexico with almost zero Mexican people working on the film. Also it’s a musical. And on Netflix.

The mechanics of what makes it not very good are not mysterious. For a musical, the music is not great and seems to have been handled with little care. Nothing sticks past the time spent in the viewing, no snippet of melody erupts through your consciousness as you make your morning coffee or walk down the street the next day. The songs have not taken hold in the culture in any form other than as a meme, which is not so much about the power of the work itself but the usefulness of the work to illustrate something else. It’s forgettable background noise.

Many of the performances are simply not very good. Selena Gomez continues to be a lifeless presence on screen, as she is in everything including her own social media selfies. I cannot really attest to the badness of her Spanish dialogue — people have complained online about her awful “Mexican” accent — except to say that I showed a clip of it to my Colombian husband and he remarked that she speaks Spanish like I speak Spanish, which is to say, not well. Zoe Soldaña is trying her best, which is not really encouraging for her larger attempt to pivot from brainless action films to serious work. The best performance in the film by far is from Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, which makes her awards campaign meltdown unfortunate. Throughout the film she is heartbreaking, luminous, and terrifying.

Whether or not the material is “offensive” has already been adjudicated effectively by the short film spoof “Johanne Sacreblu,” which swaps out Emilia’s stereotypes about Mexico with stereotypes about the French. Created by Mexican artists Camila Aurora and Héctor Guillén, it replaces a trans narco with a trans leader of a baguette empire, and it is very funny and scathing.

And while the stereotypes are bad, this is also what par for the course for a successful Hollywood film. Do you think Ridley Scott gave a shit about showing respect to French culture when he filmed the wildly historically inaccurate Napoleon? Or when he hired only American actors to do funny Italian accents for House of Gucci, as if Italy is a fictional place and the Italians something like fairies or elves? Or when he did anything that he did for Gladiator 2? Truly, the man is a fucking menace. Hollywood trades in stereotypes and arrogance, it lives to misrepresent entire genders, nations, cultures, and peoples. But as Aurora and Guillén show, complaint is not nearly as satisfying a creation as an act of revenge.

But despite its many flaws, Emilia Pérez is still recognizable as a film by director Jacques Audiard, a man who, until now, has not really put a foot wrong in his work. His films tell stories of people who have been written off — ex-cons, the newly disabled, sex workers, gangsters, migrants — but who are trying to improve both themselves and their situations. And over a 50-year career, the films he has written and/or directed have been consistently curious about the adaptations of survival and how difficulty shapes people.

Movies about people on the margins of society are often described as being “deeply humane” or “empathetic” or some other nonsense that makes most reasonable people not want to watch them. Oh, they are going to struggle valiantly and tragically? Thanks, I’d rather watch Marvel. But Audiard’s movies are sexy and thrilling, his protagonists run headlong into chaos fueled only by rage and horniness. His characters attempt to impose their will on an uncaring world, and violence in his films is an articulate form of communication. Nor does he offer neoliberal fairy tales, where dedication and hard work lead ultimately to triumph. No one wins cleanly in an Audiard film, but the messes his characters make along the way are always alluring.

The character of Emilia Pérez finds great company in Audiard’s protagonists — like Tom in The Beat that My Heart Skipped, a gangster trying to get a foothold in the early 21^st century Paris real estate market through violence and scheming. After an accidental encounter with his concert pianist mother’s manager, he attempts to leave his dangerous life behind to retrieve a discarded dream of music. He has a once-in-a-lifetime shot in the form of an audition, but his attempts to leave his family, his friends, and his old habits only find him ever more enmeshed. Tom is played by an electric Romain Duris, who is constantly moving, fidgeting, bobbing, shifting his body, as if he can squirm his way out of a confining exoskeleton he has outgrown.

Or there’s Nora in Paris, 13^th District, who attempts to leave behind a life in Bordeaux, a career in real estate, and an incestuous relationship with an uncle by enrolling in law school in Paris. As a thirty-something, she stands out among her fellow students, and when someone starts a rumor that she is actually a porn star whom she has a passing resemblance to, she is harassed into dropping out of university. But she still believes that a new life, a new sexuality, a new career are surely possible if only she never for a moment stops fighting for them. She, too, is trapped mid-transformation. Noémie Merlant plays Nora’s frustration all on the surface; her mercurial expression shifts from professionally friendly to furious in an instant, as if she can’t waste the energy to hide how she feels. She needs all her energy to outrun her past.

In Emilia Pérez, the physical transformation from male body to female body is the easiest part of Emilia’s rebirth. (It’s so easy as to be nonsensical, like someone just unzips your body and pours your innards into a new one, but whatever.) Her impulse to solve problems with power and violence is distressingly harder to leave behind. The delusion that she has changed, that she is capable of effortlessly changing from tyrant to saint, does not last long. When Emilia’s ex-wife (who thinks her narco husband is dead) becomes involved with another man, the first thought is that getting a gun would solve everything pretty neatly. Why not, it’s always worked before?

And like Audiard’s other characters, Emilia tries to blame her failings on who she used to be. Like Tom, who pins the blame for his violent behavior on his ne’er-do-well father and asshole friends, Emilia also believes her badness is only circumstantial. She would never have been a violent narco had she been born a woman. ‘I created an empire out of drugs, blood, and despair because of the gender dysphoria, I swear!’ This level of self-delusion is perhaps required to power an attempt at transformation and to break with a past that wants to keep you the way you always were. But character is not as malleable as the physical body, and eventually there has to be a confrontation with one’s limits.

And had this story of a violent man trying to become a peaceful woman come to the screen without the song and dance numbers, the presence of Selena Gomez, and the portrayal of Mexico as one step away from sombreros and mariachi, it could have been great.

But I wonder if this film reveals something uncomfortable about Audiard himself. Perhaps he has become one of his own protagonists, trying to break free from the small scale and the arthouse, the three star reviews and nice notices, the neglect by critics and award committees, and to turn himself into an international powerhouse on the level of Alfonso Cuarón or Bong Joon-ho. The film has the rage (although it sadly lacks the horniness) of any of Audiard’s great characters of the past, trying to burst through the disinterest of critics, Hollywood studios, and the cinematic audience to a new level of awareness and attention.

But much like one of his characters, he makes a mess of it. Even if the film has racked up some awards, even if it got some breathless praise after an intense publicity push by Netflix, it’s still not good. It leaves Audiard stuck, mid-transformation. No longer the auteur of the modern French margins, he has to settle for being grouped with the makers of Coda, Crash, The Green Book and all the other big winners now remembered with cringe rather than awe.

But like Tom, like Nora, even like Emilia, I am rooting for Audiard like the imperfect protagonist that he is. I want to see where they all run to.

Jessa Crispin is the author of My Three Dads, The Dead Ladies Project, The Creative Tarot, and Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto. She has written for many publications, some of which are still in existence. She is the editor-in-chief of the publication

The Culture We Deserve

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