yuri’s review published on Letterboxd:
After reading some reviews beforehand and finding out how the film handled its core themes, my expectations got significantly lower. The fact that I loathed Paris, 13th District, also didn’t make a good case in favor of this. Nevertheless, it turns out that Emilia Perez is as embarrassing as I expected. A bad musical fueled by gender essentialism.
Genuinely curious as to why directors are choosing to approach musical numbers through the same way of instructing their cast to sing either whispery or breathily. All of them ended up sounding bad. As for the songs per se, they are the worst lyrics that I’ve listened. Many words and concepts sung in a way to explain character motivations that were cringe at best and offensive at worst. Truly, there’s a whole number dedicated to gender reassignment surgery that is baffling.
Zoe Saldaña, Karla Gascón and Selena Gomez were decent. The material they had to work with just didn’t provide more than some cliches from this genre of “european/north-american does a narrative about mafia in Mexico or Latin American adjacent country”. Among the three, Saldaña had the least to work with. She has a couple of lines to fill us in what’s happening in her life, but it never feels substantial. Gomez’s character was better fleshed out, though it seems that she was set to fail. Her musical numbers were consistently poorly directed, especially the karaoke one. I understand as to why she was directed to also speak in spanish, though her line delivery in english sounded way more confident.
Karla Gascón’s performance was the strongest. She had a great screen presence and did a good job at conveying her character’s inner journey, even if this particular journey was tough to swallow. The musical aspect of the film added a playfulness that made those ideas to sound silly instead of offensive, but the writers perspective on gender was deeply confounding. Using this vapid idea of women being instinctively nurtures and the psychological confusion as a result of transitioning, all that to coalesce into an empathetic exercise that was cut dry by Rita’s judgmental (often transphobic) reactions. Mind you, she’s placed as the audience surrogate.
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