Emilia Pérez Is Bad, Actually. Why Does Awards Season Love It?

Page 114 /Why Not Productions / Pathé Films / France 2 Cinéma / Courtesy of NetflixSamantha Allen: To channel Thumper, I want to start by saying something nice about Emilia Pérez, a film I found quite confounding. Some of the performances, especially Zoe Saldaña’s as Rita and Karla Sofía Gascón’s dual turn as the pre-transition Manitas and the titular Emilia, were excellent. And from a plot structure perspective, it had some really fun ideas: In the first half of the movie, Rita is a sort of Igor to a trans Dr. Frankenstein, which has long been a resonant metaphor in our community, and then in the second half, it kind of becomes trans Mrs. Doubtfire? Which is a fun idea… in theory.

But musicals need a good reason to be musicals, and this one felt like it had song-and-dance numbers just to be cross-genre instead of the film having so much creative energy that it was simply bursting apart at the genre seams. Where did you both land on Emilia Pérez?

James Factora: As long as we’re drawing comparisons to other movies, I’ll say that it took me until last night — my third attempt at watching the film, mind you — to realize that parts of it reminded me of Repo! The Genetic Opera, tonally speaking. Maybe it was just the vaguely horrific vaginoplasty number of it all, but at least with Repo! they had the audacity to be over-the-top about it. With all of the Emilia Pérez numbers, it feels like they stop short of actually doing anything audacious in the way that good movie musicals should. And at least Repo! is (appropriately) considered one of those “so bad it’s good” camp classics; I still fail to understand why on earth Emilia Pérez has garnered as much critical acclaim as it has when it doesn’t seem like it knows what kind of movie it wants to be. Like, did we all watch the same movie?

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Fran Tirado: It also took me three sittings to complete, and each one felt more torturous. But I went into the film in good faith, as I always do, open and curious. A cartel leader fakes her own death and medically transitions? Sign me up! I am a big fan of drama for drama’s sake. I love Ugly Betty and other “problematic” depictions of trans villainy. I was ready to find something to like about it — or at the very least, something I would hate so much it would be one of those so-bad-it’s-good movies. But it was neither. I hate, hate, hate this film. I thought everyone in it was bad — bad singing, bad Spanish, bad acting, or beholden to a bad story, and therefore bad because of it. While we’re comparing, I would say Emilia Pérez is like if Ryan Murphy directed a really mid episode of Law & Order: SVU.

S.A.: It also reminded me of that 2016 Michelle Rodriguez thriller about the assassin who gets forcibly feminized — yes, that did happen — although Emilia Pérez, with all its faults, is still miles more sensitive than that movie. Honestly, the “vaginoplasty” number needed to either be toned down significantly or be Rocky Horror balls-to-the-wall outrageous, as you suggested James, instead of languishing in some weird middle area.

Do we think the film gets any credit, though, for being a prestige production that cast a trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón in a trans role at a time when that is still not a guarantee? Or is that accepting the bare minimum? I’m torn between wanting to encourage cis filmmakers to kind of “go for it” so long as they’re not being actively dehumanizing on one hand and, on the other, insisting on better standards for trans storytelling 10 years after the so-called “tipping point.”

J.F.: It’s definitely the bare minimum, but unfortunately, as you said Samantha, the bare minimum is still not a guarantee. I do think it’s really cool that Gascón was the first trans person to win Best Actress at Cannes, and I do think she thoroughly deserves that accolade for her performance. I just wish that it was a better written role.

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I am generally of the belief that people should be allowed to make movies about whatever and whoever as long as they’re being respectful, and as we saw with Sean Baker’s Tangerine, it is possible for cis white dudes to make movies about trans people that portray them as vibrant, fully formed individuals. But Emilia Pérez just doesn’t do the same. The movie gestures at the titular character’s interiority, but to me, she comes across more as a morality tale or a symbol than an actual person throughout the entire movie.

In his New Yorker review, Richard Brody called the movie “incurious,” specifically about the inner lives of both Rita and Emilia, and I think that sums it up best.

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F.T.: Though the Emilia Pérez team has talked about authentic casting or representation at every step of its press tour, in my (controversial?) opinion, “representation” has little to do with whether a film is good or bad, even if it does affect certain qualities of the film. Authentic casting is honorable, yes, and credit is certainly due to the process of the film in informing a certain industry standard. And process is certainly something Academy voters care about in their decision-making. But when I watch a movie, I personally am not evaluating the process, much like how when I eat a hot dog, I’m not evaluating the factory. I’m asking, does this hot dog taste good? And readers, it did not.

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All that to say, I’m not your average trans filmgoer. And when I say that what I mean is that I kinda liked The Danish Girl. Despite its cisgender casting, I admired its ability to capture the interiority of its protagonists, which as James pointed out, Emilia struggled to do.

“[Emilia] swaps genders, refuses accountability for a lifetime of bad behavior, and gaslights her wife and kids into spending time with her under fraudulent pretenses. This is also the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire, but Mrs. Doubtfire is a good film because it understands how absurd the character is.”

S.A.: I think what makes it an especially frustrating object for me is that I can see flashes of a film I’d prefer at almost every point. I don’t need it to be a traditional musical, necessarily, nor do I want it to be a talk-sung Evita-style opera, but I think a few more conventions could help it. Give Manitas Del Monte a villainous “I Am” Song. Give us some Busby Berkeley vibes. I love blurring the borders between genres, but you still have to keep the colors on your palette recognizable if you still want to end up with a painting in the end. Any ideas about how you might fix this movie? How do you solve a problem like Emilia?

J.F.: That reminds me: As far as I can recall, Emilia doesn’t even ever get a full on “I Want” song, which is one of those conventions that would have worked really well here, especially since queer and trans people have always particularly connected with those songs in the musical theater canon. (See: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”) But explicitly queer and trans experiences are so rarely reflected within that canon, and to make the representation argument for one second, this would have been a really cool opportunity for that.

Anyway, I think Emilia Pérez is symptomatic of a trend I’ve noticed in filmmaking in the first half of this decade (oh God): movies that are just OK or actively bad, but come dressed in all the trappings of “prestige.” I probably would have adored Emilia Pérez if it had actually been a schlocky B movie (and committed to being that) instead of a glossy production that then gets stuck somewhere between camp and self-seriousness. This movie asks us to suspend so much disbelief (again, the whole thing where Selena Gomez’s character somehow magically doesn’t notice or even suspect that Emilia is her spouse of many years?) and then … takes us nowhere. If you’re going to come up with a plot that is truly bonkers in every regard, at least commit to making the film itself bonkers in a fun way.

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GLAAD has called Emilia Pérez “a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.”

F.T.: Seconding that! Though the vaginoplasty song was something of an abomination to me, it was so wild and inventive and unpredictable in its crassness, I had no choice but to pay attention and even smile. I really wish the rest of the film felt like that. Even if the film had made me mad, or made me laugh, it would have been better than what we got tonally, which was much different from that song — so unfun and self-serious. It discarded its own absurdity and the innate joy of musicals. If it had leaned all the way in, the campy logline would have earned itself.

Back to the Mrs. Doubtfire comparison. If I were to harp on “representation,” it’s abhorrent to me within the realism of the film that Emilia does what she does. She swaps genders, refuses accountability for a lifetime of bad behavior, and gaslights her wife and kids into spending time with her under fraudulent pretenses. This is also the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire, but Mrs. Doubtfire is a good film because it understands how absurd the character is. 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. If the film had instead realized, “No, Emilia really is the villain,” and she kept on with her bad behavior, maybe murdered more people, spun out of control, fed her own absurdity — now that’s the movie I signed up for!