Emilia Pérez’s Biggest Problem Is Emilia Pérez

Photo: PATHÉ FILMS/Netflix

Emilia Pérez opens with Rita, an overworked lawyer played by Zoe Saldaña, furiously drafting her defense of a client who stands accused of murdering his wife. This being a musical, Rita determines how best to frame the case through a mix of sung vocals and swift sprechgesang as her empty, dimly lit office gives way to a convenience store, then to a food stand on a bustling Mexico City street. “This is a love story” of violence and death, she sings. “Let’s love women. Let’s forgive men.” It’s a fitting overture for the film to come, as you might expect, though the most prescient line arrives at the end of the number, when Rita throws up her hands and yells in exasperation at the narrative she’s crafted, “What bullshit!”

I found myself muttering variations of that same sentiment throughout Emilia Pérez, the latest Cannes darling from French director Jacques Audiard, which won both the Jury Prize and Best Actress at this year’s festival in May — the latter award split four ways between the film’s stars, Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz. For however captivating the cinematography or brilliant the performances might have been, the story at the core of the film, of Gascón’s gruff cartel leader, Manitas, who hires Rita to help “him” become the woman “he” has always wanted to be — the titular Emilia — spoiled the rest of the picture for me from the inside out.

The conventions of the movie musical might seem out of step with Audiard’s typical filmmaking. The director is known for his intimate, slowly unfurling portraits of those at society’s margins, struggling to make a life and, in the process, remaking themselves. A Prophet (Un prophète), for example, which took home the Cannes Grand Prix in 2009 along with several César Awards, follows a young incarcerated man named Malik who navigates his prison’s racially segregated rival factions in order to find security and, later, build power. De rouille et d’os, a 2012 Cannes Palme d’Or nominee released stateside as Rust and Bone, concerns a broke single father and aspiring boxer who falls for an amputee orca trainer. These films and others like Dheepan, Audiard’s 2015 Palme d’Or winner about Tamil refugees starting their lives over in France, showcase worlds of quiet intimacies, where dreams and ambitions are understood to be fragile and thus held close to the chest, not announced to the world through some big song and dance. Adding a bunch of musical numbers, even smaller, semi-diegetic sequences like those that punctuate Joker: Folie à Deux, would appear to be counterintuitive to the story as he’s telling it.

Photo: Courtesy of Netflix

Yet Emilia Pérez, which is now showing in theaters and will be available on Netflix beginning November 13, does fit right in with Audiard’s greater filmography. It’s told through languages that are foreign to the director, for one — primarily Spanish with English sprinkled in. Les Olympiades featured French and Mandarin; Dheepan’s characters spoke Tamil, French, and English. “For me, there’s a music to language,” Audiard recently told W. “Not knowing the language gives me a quality of detachment. When I’ve directed in my own language, I get stuck on the details.” Speaking with Le Monde about his decision not to write a musical in his native language, he was far more blunt: “[French is] absurd … an embarrassing language.” Emilia Pérez also retains the same shaky cinematography found in Audiard’s other works, as well as the occasional dream sequence shrouded in darkness, which call to mind Malik’s visions in Un prophète. And although generally quite intimate in scope, the film manages to incorporate large-scale, choreographed musical numbers into its narrative without feeling disjointed. Most sensational of these would be Rita’s consultation with a plastic surgeon in Bangkok, who details a suite of sex-change procedures that he could perform on Emilia in one fell swoop (“Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!” etc.) as nurses twirl their gurneyed patients around them in concentric circles, a spectacle that Variety critic Peter Debruge aptly likened to those of Busby Berkeley.

So, what about this film didn’t work for me? Well, let’s return to that musical sequence at the Thai surgery clinic. Rita’s there because Emilia has promised to pay her $2 million in exchange for arranging her surgeries, faking her death, and establishing a new legal identity for her postoperative self. Those last two feats, I’m certain, would be quite difficult to accomplish, but Bangkok’s reputation as a hub for transsexual medical tourism is as well established as it is easily Googleable; I couldn’t help but laugh when I realized that Emilia had paid someone millions of dollars to uncover this basic fact for her. Nor could I stifle my involuntary snorting at Audiard’s portrayal of a surgery consult, which involved a surgeon simply naming procedures and Rita saying “Yes!” to each one, or his depiction of Emilia’s surgeries themselves, apparently performed all at once, which displayed an understanding of plastic surgery that’s about as refined as McG’s recent Uglies, in which a fabulously villainous Laverne Cox forces full-body yassification gas on an unwilling teenage populace. It also made me think of how Ed Wood describes medical transition in his beautiful 1953 train wreck, Glen or Glenda, in which he claims that “hundreds of hormone shots [must be] injected into various parts of the body.”

I don’t demand total realism from every film that I see. I can even appreciate the camp, whether intentional or not, of Emilia waking up from her 5-million simultaneous surgeries, her face bandaged like a mummy save for her eyes and lips. But I expect that a filmmaker so taken by the concept of transitioning, one who’s displayed a certain level of conscious sensitivity in his previous efforts to depict lives unlike his own, to at least display an informed understanding of what that concept actually looks like in practice.

“Gender transition seems to fascinate just about everyone who hasn’t gone through it,” the Canadian author Casey Plett once wrote in critiquing what she termed “gender novels,” or fiction that utilizes transness as a metaphor to help cis people learn something new about themselves. Plett’s analysis is very much applicable to Emilia’s transition and the purpose it serves in the film. For Epifanía, Emilia’s girlfriend played by Paz, it’s a lesson in giving yourself permission to “be free … as free as the air.” For Rita and Emilia’s transphobic Israeli surgeon, it’s fodder for a thought experiment. Despite agreeing to do the procedures, the surgeon suggests that instead of having plastic surgery, “he,” meaning Emilia, “better change his mind,” adding that although the surgeon can change Emilia’s body, “you cannot change the soul.” To this, Rita argues, “Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.” There, I guess, is a Monkey’s Paw morsel of realism: two cis people debating the ethics of transness without any trans people present.

The film’s perspective doesn’t cleave neatly to either side of this socratic debate. On the one hand, it affirms Emilia’s claim to womanhood, to a ridiculous degree at times. (Both Rita and Emilia talk about Manitas, Emilia’s pre-transition self, as if “he” were a different person.) On the other, it presents Emilia as a nesting doll of gendered selves. She is a woman trapped in the body of a man, then a woman in denial of the man she still harbors within. There’s a cruelty to this portrayal of a trans woman, as if the filmmaker blames her for failing to accept herself for all that he believes her to be. This emerges most revoltingly during a scene in which Emilia grows upset with her unsuspecting widow, played by Gomez, and responds by throwing her onto a bed and choking her, while threatening her in a low, masculine voice — the same voice with which she spoke before she surgically transitioned.

Overall, though, the film presents transition as inherently redemptive. In Emilia’s case, she not only transitions from male to female (“from penis to vagina,” as one of her surgeons helpfully explains). She also transitions from a cartel leader responsible for the deaths of untold thousands to the founder of a nonprofit that seeks to assist the families of victims of cartel violence. It seems to be just as Rita had theorized, that changing the body changes the soul and changing the soul changes society. But all I could think of was that one famous punch line from Tim Robinson’s sketch show, I Think You Should Leave: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.” Gascón gives an incredible performance, as do all of her co-stars, but I loathed her character, largely because I sensed that the film wanted me to like her, to root for her transition from an evil rich man to an evil rich woman, to celebrate her solely for the fact of her transition. (“I’m happy now. I’m myself,” says Emilia, who repeats variations of such “true self” talk many times throughout the film.)

Ironically, a film about a wealthy trans woman who tries to redeem her pre-transition self by founding a nonprofit that claims to help others has the potential to be hilarious, biting, and current, but that potential escapes Audiard, who fails to realize that his titular heroine is, if anything, the villain of his film. He’s so focused on wanting to humanize her — in patronizing, at times insulting terms — that her humanity is sacrificed in the process.