Emilia Pérez is a star-studded Oscars favourite, but it has become mired in controversy and criticism

"When I was thinking about trans identity, I'd ask Karla and she would give me the answers," director Jacques Audiard
told screen daily. "She's incredible — her personal history makes her very specific as an actress." (Supplied: Kismet)

By Sonia Nair

If the buzz surrounding Emilia Pérez is anything to go by, you'd be forgiven for thinking the award-winning Mexican musical telenovela directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard is worth its salt. But Greta Gerwig — jury president at the 2024 Cannes, who presented the Best Actress award to the cast of Emilia Pérez — feting a film does not necessarily a good film make.

The premise is one of the best things Emilia Pérez has going for it. The genre-bending film opens with overworked Mexican–Dominican lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) feverishly preparing for a case in which her team is defending a media mogul who is (rightfully) accused of murdering his wife. Because Emilia Pérez is a musical, Rita is weaving in and out of an ensemble cast of street stallholders singing "this is a love story" of violence, justice and death. The stage is set.

After the case is won and the man acquitted, Rita is kidnapped by cartel drug lord Juan 'Manitas' Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón). Manitas wishes to transition into a woman and offers Rita a lucrative deal she can't pass up: if she arranges their gender-affirming surgery covertly, helps them fabricate their death and establish a new legal identity, and safely stows their family away in Switzlerland, she'll be rewarded with the princely sum of $2 million.

"I remember feeling, 'Oh my god, is this really real? Jacques Audiard is doing a movie that I may be right for? What?'"
Zoe Saladan told Deadline about working with the director. (Supplied: Kismet)

This section of the film is where things first descend into chaos. Rita travels across the world in search of a surgeon, most notably to Bangkok, where the laughably bad song 'La Vaginoplastia' is performed by a rotating cavalcade of doctors and nurses chanting 'man to woman, woman to man'.

After journeying to countless other countries, Rita settles on Israeli surgeon Dr Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), and Manitas's gender-affirming surgery takes place in Tel Aviv. The uncritical inclusion of a major plot development taking place in a country that has been illegally occupying Palestinian territory since 1967, and is currently involved in a brutal and polarising war, feels like a tone-deaf choice at best. It's one of the many blind spots of a film that personifies a type of imperialist feminism.

"I wouldn't sing well, and I wouldn't be the best dancer [but] I understood that this character was for me," Karla Sofía Gascón told The Hollywood Reporter about convincing herself she could find the essence of Emilia Perez. 
(Supplied: Kismet)

The cartel kingpin is reborn as Emilia Pérez, a worldly woman who sits on a gargantuan fortune with untraceable origins. But it turns out Emilia can't live without her family: wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two sons, who remain unaware that Emilia is still alive. She approaches Rita once again — this time to arrange for their reunion, under the guise that Emilia is Manitas's long-lost relation.

Gaping plot holes aside, things descend further into absurdity when Emilia conjures the bright idea to establish an NGO devoted to recovering the remains of Mexicans disappeared by cartel-related violence — murders that, in many cases, were perpetrated by her. 

Duplicity reigns in every aspect of Emilia's life — on the domestic front, where she pretends to her children and her wife that she's a long-lost relation, and on the professional front, where she obscures her identity to salvage her guilt, seek redemption and eschew accountability.

Selena Gomez addressed the criticism of her Spanish, apologising on X and saying, "I did the best I could with the
time I was given", while adding that it, "doesn't take away from how much work and heart I put into this movie". 
(Supplied: Kismet)

Emilia Pérez is riddled with problematic gender essentialism that sees Emilia completely overturn her moral compass when she transitions into a woman. Emilia can be a kind and nurturing woman, but speaks in a more masculine voice when she's being abusive, manipulative and possessive — ascribing circumscribed qualities to each gender and portraying transness as an act of deception.

And though Emilia has transitioned into a new person, the consequences of her past as a drug lord who murdered and kidnapped untold thousands remain, as do her wealth and network of corrupt cronies. A more interesting, less reductive film may have explored Emilia wrestling with this reality, instead of cleaving her past and present selves into mutually exclusive personas — seemingly unconnected to one another — and presenting gender transition as a redemptive salve that absolves Emilia of past sins.

What's worse is the lack of sensitivity and factual accuracy underpinning Emilia's transition. In an otherwise touching moment, Emilia's children — thinking she's their aunty — remark that she smells like their father, an impossibility with the hormone replacement therapy Emilia would be on. There's dead-naming, misgendering, and trans identity described in the language of 'halves'.

First published at ABC News, January 20, 2025

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