Why Emilia Pérez is the Riskiest Movie You’ve Seen in Years
French director Jacques Audiard’s new trans identity story has exploded onto the big screen - and it’s leaving critics and audiences hugely divided.
good.film
2 months ago
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If you’re a fan of wild swings in your movies, buckle up, because there’s 3 incredible stories lighting up the big screen right now: a Mexican cartel boss who vanishes without a trace. A transgender woman who goes to extreme and questionable lengths to raise her children. A Spanish-language musical about gendered violence and corruption. These sticks of dynamite are all packed into the same powderkeg of a movie, which then lights the match with one big question: despite our appearances, how much can a person change at their core?
French director Jacques Audiard first conceived of Emilia Pérez as an opera libretto, before it transformed into, in his words, a film noir, melodrama, comedy musical telenovela. For such important themes, this audacious combination may seem indelicate, even brazen. And yes, the film has drawn some criticism (more on that below). But it’s obvious that the soul of Emilia Pérez beats with the daring of a curious artist who prizes emotional authenticity above all else.
Audiard uses a mash-up of styles and genres to keep us gripped while he keenly poses powerful questions around corruption, identity, family, and atonement. The first of these themes is brought angrily to life by Rita, superbly played by Zoe Saldaña. We see the world through her defence lawyer’s eyes, where a domestic violence murder is a “routine case”. But because the client is wealthy, she mutters, this prick kills his wife and we call it "suicide". Her bitterness is clear, and it explodes into the film’s first song, El Alegato – The Allegation.
It's an amazing tonal shift, marrying the intensity of a song about domestic violence with actions that are energetic, tender, and furious all at the same time. Plainly put, it shouldn’t work – but it does. As the song continues, Rita writes the closing argument, but doesn’t get to deliver it in court; that job goes to the firm’s (male) partner. And when her client is inevitably judged innocent, her inner monologue says What bullshit! He looks like a criminal.
Audiard quickly establishes Rita’s morality, her need for justice, and her perceived value as a woman of colour all at once. There’s a ticking clock in her heart: How much longer will I hang my head? How much longer will I lick their boots, waste my talent on them, toil away for nothing? She’s proud of her career, but not her direction; she feels powerless to change it. Her friends wonder when she might open her own firm – Who knows, she replies, When will I no longer be Black?
Rita’s in a professional limbo… until she’s kidnapped from the street, blindfolded and grilled by one of Mexico’s most dangerous men. Even under a hood in a blacked-out van, Rita knows exactly who she’s dealing with. Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) heads up Mexico’s biggest drug cartel, and he wants Rita’s help to vanish and escape. It’s a proposal laced with incredible personal risk – but crucially, it speaks to her need to bring good to the world. Could helping this gangster disappear be Rita’s chance to prevent more murder and injustice?
Growling his needs in a kind of half poem-half rap, Manitas spells it out: I have unlimited resources. I have $2 million for you to help me find a safe place, somewhere untraceable. And I want to be a woman. It might sound like a buddy-comedy punchline, but Audiard and Gascón ensure that the authenticity of Manitas’ desire is keenly felt and rings true.
For Emilia Pérez to work at all, it’s crucial that we believe this twist, and it’s a testament to Gascón’s performance that we do. As a trans actress herself, obviously her lived experience informs the role, and that authenticity is essential here to ground such an audacious story. As Manitas sings tenderly to Rita I want another face… I want another skin… I want my soul to smell like honey, we absolutely feel the pain of his double life.
Audiard is asking us to reconcile, in real time, the life of a murderous drug lord with a sorrowful soul who yearns with a profound desire for change. Unsurprisingly, Gascón portrays that emotion with supreme grace – she understands it intimately. Also deserving praise are the make-up crew, who utilized prosthetics, skin texturing and facial tattoo effects to transform Gascón into someone male-presenting for her scenes as Manitas.
Audiard taking the story and character to these extremes (Saldaña calls it a hyperreality) isn’t just a stunt. Manitas’ transition symbolizes a broader cultural shift: one person’s change as a metaphor for our wider acceptance of trans rights as a culture. This idea plays out when Rita travels to Tel Aviv to interview a gender reassignment surgeon, who sings I do the body. Not the brain. If he's a he, he'll be a he. If she's a she, she'll be a she. If he's a wolf, he'll be a wolf.
But Rita pushes back on this, singing Doctor, let me disagree. Changing the body changes society, changing society changes the soul. Changing the soul changes it all. In other words, giving Manitas the freedom to live authentically as Emilia will be life changing – for her, and the countless other ‘Emilias’ who remain closeted behind her. Emilia Pérez the film serves the same purpose; giving those of us who’ll never feel Emilia’s pain a window into her experience.
In its second act Emilia Pérez deepens the stakes, as the theme of family and belonging is introduced along with Manitas’ wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children. When Manitas admits the surgery means I must leave a great deal behind me, we know he’s referring to them. Rita is the middleman, setting up a confused and upset Jessi and their children in Switzerland with new identities, reassuring them that they’re safe and wealthy – but alone.
It raises a question that’s nearly impossible to answer: could you give up your own family to live as your true self? Is it possible to read this choice as anything other than inherently selfish? But Manitas makes it clear to Rita, to his doctors, and to us: I have no choice. I can’t cope anymore. All my life, it’s all I’ve ever wanted. After the surgery, Emilia’s tears of joy tell us so, and she carefully practices saying her new name as if she’s in a dream.
When Rita crosses paths with Emilia 4 years later, her blood runs cold, thinking Emilia’s planning to erase the last witness to her old identity. But now, Emilia has a different goal: I need you to bring my children back to Mexico. I beg of you. I can’t live without them. It’s a fascinating admission, suggesting that while Emilia’s identity has changed, her personality – her ongoing need for control – hasn’t. Her selfishness continues to drive her. When she felt I can’t cope, she sent her children away. Now that she can’t live without them, she wants to upend their lives – again.
Once again, Rita gets to work. Telling them it’s now safe to return to Mexico, she uproots Jessi and her children to live in a mansion with Emilia – posing as Manitas’ ‘distant cousin’. It’s ironic how patriarchal this move is from Emilia; it’s really just another instance of the life-altering decisions she would make as the leader of a powerful cartel. She is still exercising immense power, just without the tattoos and firearms. But her family are still rendered as possessions.
Audiard gives us an insight into living under this patriarchal threat as Jessi attempts to rebuild her life, again, back in Mexico. Cue Selena Gomez performing an angry, crusading song about her life as Manitas’ “property”; how the violence of her husband casts a looming shadow even while she believes him to be dead. She still has no agency over her money or where she calls home. She soon reaches out to an old flame, Gustavo (Edgar Ramírez) – it’s the only level of fulfilment she can control. But the danger is obvious. How does the possessive Emilia, effectively incognito, handle seeing her wife openly dating another man?
We soon find out, in a scene where Emilia coolly grills Jessi about her love life, like a cat toying with a mouse. Did she love her husband? Why did she have an affair, and why did she break it off? Jessi’s answer is simple and intense: If he found out, he would've cut us into pieces and fed us to the dogs. It’s illuminating to watch Jessi answer Emilia with no awareness that she’s speaking with her former husband. Remember, we’re in hyperreality; Audiard is interrogating the duality of trans identity in a heightened way. He even nods to this mild absurdity with a line whispered by Rita: It's a miracle she didn't recognise you!
Another beautiful complexity reveals itself when Emilia tucks her son into bed, who tells her You smell like Papa. It prompts a delicate, childlike song about their memories of their father’s aroma: he smelled like leather and coffee, and sweat and the engine of the car. He smelled like grass and mescal, and cigars when he hugged us for the last time. But this ode is really about the sense of protection and comfort Manitas gave them. He was a loving father, and he’s deeply missed. It’s a tender, heartbreaking scene, and if you were that father, hearing your child sing mournfully about their lingering sense of you would tear you apart.
Audiard uses this emotion to launch his film into its third act, contrasting Emilia’s need to publicly atone, against her private moral failings. It begins when a distraught mother approaches Emilia and Rita, handing out flyers while searching for her missing son – a flip of Emilia’s kids mourning their own father. It prompts Emilia to set up a foundation to provide closure for families with missing fathers, husbands, brothers, sons. Over 100,000 people are missing in Mexico due to drug related violence, she urges Rita. We can’t stand idly by.
The irony, of course, is that Manitas probably contributed to thousands of those deaths. Emilia is essentially hiding in the open, speaking about her foundation to news crews, working to undo the societal damage she contributed to for years. She used to bury men. Now they're (literally) digging them up. It’s basically a redemption story, says Audiard of his film’s final act. Does changing genders help you see men’s violence in a different light? He theorises that a sexual transition can also represent a kind of phoenix from the ashes; a “washing clean”.
But life is rarely that neat. As Emilia Pérez careens toward an explosive finale, the film is open about Emilia’s unchecked sense of control. She falls in love with Epifania (Adriana Paz), a victimized widow she meets through her foundation who cries with joy when she learns her husband is dead (an obvious nod to the domestic abuse she suffered at his hands). It prompts a very pretty love song where Emilia sings Who am I? I have no idea, I was born at this very moment. It’s as though we can see the future in her eyes.
But while Emilia’s free to sleep with whomever she pleases, when Jessi announces her own engagement to Gustavo, the hypocrisy comes roaring to the fore. You won’t take MY kids away from me! If you were a former gangland boss, what levers would you pull to prevent a situation you didn’t like? Or as Audiard muses, How do you get rid of fathers’ violence? Suddenly, the lines are hugely blurred as Emilia returns to her former, violent modus operandi.
Emilia became a woman, renounced her life as the leader of a criminal gang, and dedicates her (considerable) resources to helping women escape violence. But privately, she still puppeteers her wife and children, threatening them the same way she did as a husband and father. Emilia’s changed her body, but the same heart beats within her now as it did before. You can’t help but recall the surgeon’s words to Rita, years before: If he’s a wolf, he’ll be a wolf.
This binary perspective has resulted in some rocky reactions to Emilia Pérez, and it’s true that the film has been wildly divisive. Some have argued that the film relies on problematic tropes for transgender characters on screen (for example, Emilia’s voice changes from masculine to feminine based on her emotions). Audiard freely admits I don’t have academic knowledge about the transgender issue… what stayed with me is [Gascón’s] determination and courage.
It’s this recognition, and not semantics like vocal tones, that’s important to hang onto. What is the overall intent of Emilia Pérez? Does it aim to inspire acceptance, or rejection? Clearly, it’s the former – Audiard rewrote the Rita character, originally a male lawyer, as a Black immigrant woman, and Karla Sofía Gascón herself has said that on reading Audiard’s script, she definitely felt understood as both a woman and a trans woman.
Surgery and therapy may replace male attributes with female ones, but the question Audiard pursues is, what about the soul? In other words, does the wolf remain a wolf? Gascón has told interviewers, Jacques had been thinking about this project, mulling over these questions for a long time. And while Emilia Pérez doesn’t claim to have the answers, what’s clear is Audiard’s genuine advocacy for all women, and his belief in their power to change the world.
Similarly, Emilia Pérez has the power to make moviegoers sit up and take notice. After winning three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s gone on to be nominated for over 250 international awards. It’s brilliantly directed, pulsing with energy, and doesn’t let up for a second; there’s an unquestionable passion to the film. To tell this meaty story through rhythm, song and dance is an incredible risk. Fortunately, the cinema screen is where bold risks are still allowed to unfold. Emilia Pérez is a pure force; designed to grab us by the hearts and minds and wow us.
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