“Emilia Pérez” Is a Bad Movie

Leading the pack with 13 Oscar nominations, it's looking like the next "Green Book"

January 23, 2025 4:37 pm EST
Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldana in the now Oscar-nominated "Emilia Pérez"
Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldana in the now Oscar-nominated "Emilia Pérez"
Netflix

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year’s Oscars on Thursday morning, and Emilia Pérez, a Spanish-language musical from French director Jacques Audiard about a trans cartel boss who undergoes gender-affirming surgery, led the pack with 13 nods, including Best Picture. On the surface, this is cause for celebration: It’s the most-nominated Spanish-language film in Oscar history, and Karla Sofía Gascón is the first openly trans actress to ever be nominated. The only problem? Emilia Pérez is not a good movie.

The film has rightfully angered both the LGBTQ+ community, who find its depiction of a trans woman to be harmful and reductive, and Mexican critics, who question its authenticity and argue it relies on stereotypes. Our own critic Mark Asch wrote that he “outright hated” it when he caught it at Cannes in May. GLAAD has even called it a “step backward for trans representation.” Why, then, has it become an awards-season favorite?

Oscar voters have never exactly embraced nuance, and they have a history of nominating movies that tackle important topics in clumsy or outright offensive ways (see: Crash, Green Book). Emilia Pérez ticks a lot of boxes that signal to these voters that it’s groundbreaking — a trans character depicted by an actual trans person! An all-Latina lead cast! — but if any of them bothered to look a little deeper, they’d find that it’s incredibly problematic.

For one, it’s a Spanish-language movie about a Mexican trans woman, written and directed by a cis white man who elected to film it in France and doesn’t even speak Spanish. The majority of its main characters are played by non-Mexican actors. (Gascón, who plays the title character, is from Spain; Zoe Saldana was born in the States to Dominican parents; Édgar Ramírez is Venezuelan; and Selena Gomez is of Mexican descent but was born and raised in Texas and had to learn Spanish for the role.) Mexican critics have accused the film of making light of a drug war that has claimed 500,000 lives by giving it a musical treatment. Even when Emilia decides to atone for her past by creating an organization dedicated to finding the remains of the victims of cartel violence to provide closure to their families, it’s a surface-level plot point at best, primarily relegated to one musical number.

Selena Gomez’s performance has drawn justifiable criticism for her lack of proficiency in Spanish. Mexican comedian Eugenio Derbez went viral on TikTok recently when he called her pronunciation “indefensible.” Even as a non-native speaker whose Spanish doesn’t extend beyond a high-school level, I felt that Gomez didn’t understand the lines she was tasked with reading. As podcast host Gaby Meza put it in her interview with Debez, “There’s a disconnect between the words she says and her understanding of them. Her body, her voice, her tones say something, but the dialogue doesn’t match with what she’s saying. And that’s not Selena’s fault, because I think she wasn’t given the proper indications, the tools for her performance. The director is French and Selena is from the United States, but they’re communicating in Spanish.”

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Gomez’s wooden performance isn’t even the worst thing about the movie. Emilia Pérez spends a good chunk of the movie misgendering and deadnaming its lead character, referring to her with male pronouns until she undergoes gender-affirming surgery. When we first meet her, she reveals to Saldana’s character Rita, the lawyer who has been tasked with helping her transition, that she has been taking hormones for two years, and she flashes her chest to offer some sort of proof. (Yet we’re also expected to believe that none of the cartel members have noticed that their boss has grown breasts.) The movie falsely implies that the only way to really be trans is to medically transition, and its view of gender in general is completely binary. At one point, a character literally sings, “Man to woman, penis to vaginaaaaaaaa,” and it’s as cringey as you’d expect.

As Juan Barquin of Little White Lies writes, “The film’s regressive politics are everywhere, not just in the way Emilia’s transition is presented (complete with a ‘woman stares at her new vagina through a pocket mirror’ shot that bafflingly comes while Emilia is still bandaged from head to toe after surgery). Any time Emilia ‘reverts’ to her ‘old ways’, Gascón lowers her vocal register as if to equate masculinity with evil and femininity with good.”

Many trans and queer critics have taken issue with the way the movie uses Emilia’s transition as some sort of clunky metaphor for her “rebirth” as an upstanding citizen after her years as a murderous druglord. That includes Fran Tirado of Them, who sums it up this way: “Emilia Pérez doesn’t know how absurd she is. Instead, her transition is framed as an absolution, used as a tool for deception, and made to be the reason for her redemption and saint-like anointing at the end. It is an idea of transness so completely from the cis imagination.

The result is a character who winds up being little more than a tired stereotype. Writer Amelia Hansford put it best in her piece “As a Trans Woman, This Is Why I Think Emilia Pérez Is Sub-Par, Disingenuous, Harmful Nonsense,” where she explains how Emilia’s lack of any real personal growth and continued cartel connections reduce her to “yet another psychopathic trans character” in a long line of problematic depictions. “Emilia Pérez is primarily a film about being reborn, and it tries to use the idea of transitioning to convey that through her transition, Emilia is trying to repent for the sins she committed in her time as cartel boss,” she writes. “The issue with this is that transition isn’t a moral decision, and the act of transitioning alone doesn’t somehow absolve you of your past self. It isn’t a death, nor is it a rebirth.”

Even if we were to completely ignore all of the ways in which Emilia Pérez has managed to alienate and offend the communities it aims to depict, it’s still a flat-out bad movie. None of the characters have any depth, the musical numbers are simultaneously dull and embarrassing, and the script simply doesn’t make sense. (We’re expected to believe, for example, that Gomez’s character wouldn’t recognize her spouse of many years.) Entire storylines are waved away with one or two quick expository scenes. We don’t even ever find out how Emilia faked her own death; all we get is one shot of a reporter on TV announcing that DNA belonging to her was found. Two key love interests — Emilia’s new girlfriend and Gustavo, the man Gomez’s character is sleeping with — barely have any lines. Even the action sequences in the movie’s climactic fight (the results of which I won’t spoil here) are just plain boring.

The fact that Academy voters can’t see that is, frankly, insane. Should it actually take home Best Picture, it’ll no doubt be remembered decades from now as one of the more unfathomable winners in Oscar history. If anything, its nominations are a sign of how far the Academy still has to go when it comes to diversity and inclusion. How else can we explain their refusal to listen to the members of the groups it claims to be celebrating?

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