Mi Problema With Emilia Pérez
Jacques Audiard’s Overpraised New Film Is Really Too Much Ado about Nothing
I’ve been waiting, not exactly with bated breath but certainly with some curiosity, for the release of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez in this country since its World Premiere at the Cannes Film Festival early this year. Here was a film that promised to push so many buttons, most in the wrong way: a Spanish-language musical set in Mexico about a violent cartel leader who fakes his death to undergo a gender-transition operation. The film became a sensation in Cannes and the Greta Gerwig-led jury gave the film’s four actresses —Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gómez and Adriana Paz— the best actress award. I was, quite frankly, hoping that the film would provoke another discussion about cultural appropriation and cis-gender perspectives on the trans experience. But Emilia Pérez, as craftful as it is, left me indifferent. And that’s the worst sin any work of art can commit.
If anything, the one thing I really resent about all the attention placed by my fellow critics in the festival circuit on this mediocre effort, is that it came at the expense of much better Latin American films directed and written by Latin American filmmakers. My brethren would much rather waste time with an European vision of Latin America than to engage with the actual countries. They all rushed to the Toronto premiere of Emilia Pérez at the expense of such films as Academy Award-winning cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s directorial debut Pedro Páramo (like Emilia Pérez a Netflix release) or Daniel Burman’s Transmitzvah (a movie about gender identity by the chronicler par excellence of Buenos Aires’ Jewish community). Latin America remains the ugly duckling of international cinema among North American and, more specifically, U.S. critics.
The film not only opens with a song but also with the cliched image of two mariachi musicians in neon lights and the electronically altered voice of a street vendor. We are immediately introduced to Rita (Saldaña), a frustrated attorney born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Mexico, working on her laptop, seated on a food stall, on a brief that will help exonerate a man accused of pushing off his wife from their apartment balcony. It’s a well-choreographed number (like most of the numbers in the film) with a distinctive reggaeton-like beat about violence and feminicide and the powerful getting off scot-free. A song, like many in the film, that plays an expository role. Rita is kidnapped by drug lord Manitas del Monte (Gascón) who hires Rita to help him fake his death, undergo a gender confirmation surgery and move his wife Jessi (Gómez) and their two children to Switzerland. A ridiculous, and almost offensive, number about the different types of body enhancements in Singapore and another about the moral and social implications of the operation follow.
Four years later, Rita, now living la dolce vita in London, runs into a woman named Emilia Pérez (Gascón) at a party and puts two and two together. As the last person who would connect Emilia to Manitas, Rita fears for her life, but Emilia wants to hire her services for another reason. She wants to move back to Mexico with Jessi and her children under the guise of being Manitas’ cousin. Once there, a guilt-ridden Emilia decides to establish a not-for-profit that will help find the bodies of those men and women her past incarnation as Manitas and her fellow drug lords disposed of in clandestine graves all across the country. Meanwhile, Jessi has rekindled her relationship with a former lover (a wasted Edgar Ramírez; to call this role a glorified cameo would be doing it a favor), waking in Emilia some old jealousies while she herself is having an affair with the wife of one of the disappeared (Paz). And what of poor Rita? What of her, indeed. Saldaña may have as much screen time as Gascón, and she does a lot with it, but in terms of story, Rita really has nothing much to do during the film’s second half other than play the role of Emilia’s consigliere.
More musical numbers about parenthood and the hypocrisy of Mexico’s powerful are sprinkled throughout until the film’s violent denouement. But as written by Clément Ducol and Camille and scored to a persistent eurobeat, they are hardly memorable. Compare them to the songs written by Ron and Russell Mael, aka Sparks, for their singularly bizarre dark fairy tale musical Annette, directed by Leos Caraix: they not only drove the plot but offered insight on their characters’ state of mind. Most importantly, they left an indelible mark on our imaginations, the way great musicals do, thanks to the imaginative and provocative way they were directed by Caraix and photographed by Caroline Champetier.
The film’s greatest weakness is Audiard’s direction and intent. So vested is he in pressing every single button that he ends up provoking nothing: no empathy, no rage, nothing. The main concept itself is provocative enough: a drug lord undergoing a gender transition in a violent, misogynist world itself is tantalizing. Also one full of landmines. So is the idea that such a transition might even change your emotional DNA, especially after years of living in a world where you inflicted violence upon others or were the recipient of such violence. While you can’t clearly accuse Audiard of cultural appropriation, there is something slightly discomfiting about his treatment of the end result of such violence upon an entire country.
And I think that is why, in the end, Emilia Pérez left me so indifferent: the realization that Audiard did not have the courage of his convictions, that he pulled his punches as he was working on it, leaving his quartet of actresses to pick up the slack. Emilia Pérez is, indeed, too much ado about nothing.
Emilia Pérez is currently playing in select theaters and will begin streaming on Netflix on Nov. 13