Emilia Perez Is the Trans Bohemian Rhapsody
"Papa... you smell like Papa..."
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Emilia Pérez, winner of the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is the Bohemian Rhapsody of trans cinema. A thoughtless, oafishly composed, spiritually ugly attempt at complex representation, it fails at both the thorny challenge of addressing trans identity and the simple task of assembling a functional film.
The last film I saw by director Jacques Audiard was The Sisters Brothers, a palatable Western with a unique-yet-unnerving stylish French affect. This film, produced by Yves Saint Laurent, takes that same sheen south of the border and across the globe to tell the story of a drug kingpin who leaves her life behind to transition.
Before we get into how Audiard handles all that, let’s start with the basic building blocks of the story.
In the context of a musical, I’m willing to accept that, for instance, a GRS clinic would do all its surgeries on a single, open, circular floor; or that Rita (Zoe Saldaña) would be present at the scene of the climactic car crash. But when the most grounded parts of your movie are the most outlandish, you’ve made a huge mistake.
In music-free, dramatic scenes, we’re meant to accept that Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) would kidnap a lawyer to get her to research doctors who perform gender-affirming surgeries. That Rita has to fly around the world to learn what surgeries are available. That the Israeli surgeon they settle on would come to the cartel’s deserted underpass hangout spot to do the surgery consult, but Emilia would have to fly to Israel to get the actual surgeries (all at once, of course).
This is all in just the first act, but while it doesn’t get much better from there, it underpins a fundamental flaw in Audiard’s concept here: he has no idea how any of this works.
This goes not just for the act of transitioning, but also the experience of being trans. After she transitions, we see her wife fail to recognize her, her children say she smells like their dad, and a whole other host of indignities that culminate in her offscreen death. Like 2005’s Transamerica, it follows a trans woman as she comes face-to-face with her past. Unlike Transamerica, it offers no closure, no dignity, and no compassion to its own protagonist. Her voice gets deeper when she’s angry.
Beyond that, the film is often propelled by the title character’s flighty desires. She must leave her family behind, then she must see them again, then she must rekindle her mob ties, then she must… start a nonprofit?
There’s another thing: at least halfway through, the movie becomes a PSA about missing persons for like, 20 minutes? The only time it comes up after that is when, after she dies, locals hail her as a hero for her work uncovering the bodies of victims she was often responsible for killing.
It offers the same “trans people get away with murder” punchline you might see on, say, South Park. And at the same time, there’s zero sense of a trans community, a trans life. She can’t learn anything about the trans experience from peers, because there are no peers. She can only spend millions to send a stranger around the world to learn for her. Her only friend is her (cis) lawyer, and her only romantic attachment is a cis woman whose abusive husband she killed (a secret she takes to her grave).
Essential to Emilia’s character is that she has exorbitant amounts of money. Years after ostensibly renouncing the cartel and starting a new life, she still leads one of luxury in a lavish Mexico City home. The fact that she’s able to spend millions on her whims is intimately tied to her transition, and as such, it’s often impossible not to view it as an attempt to evade justice, even if she clearly is “really” trans.
Her American wife, Jessica (Selena Gomez), was cheating on her before she left. After faking her own death, she reintroduces herself to Jessica as her former self’s sister, a ruse she doesn’t let up even when Gomez is literally cutting off her fingers. Gomez makes a conscious effort to step outside her comfort zone here, but one of the film’s few musical highlights comes when she lets the pop star mask slip.
By the way, if you haven’t heard, this film is a musical. There are a few fun numbers, but its musical conceits mostly fall flat as it attempts to straddle Hamilton and Annette and ends up somewhere in the vein of Carmen (2022).
Is the cast good? I suppose, given the material they’re working with. Zoe Saldaña especially shines, breathing a little bit of life into the herky-jerky choreography and talk-singing. But even her most emotional moments are bogged down by the sense that even the director himself might not know how we’re supposed to feel about all this.
More than anything else, it’s a woefully dated, structurally-unsound piece of cinema. Like Bohemian Rhapsody, it treats Emilia’s identity as an original sin for which she’s ultimately punished by death. It’s never her actual past deeds that come back to bite her, it’s always about the dishonesty of her convoluted cover-up.
Also like Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s likely to ride its initial goodwill all the way to the Oscars. While cis people in the industry pat themselves on the back for celebrating it, a growing chorus of trans voices is calling BS. This is not a #representationwin, nor is it a challenging or nuanced portrayal of Issues, nor is it a satisfying musical or a coherent crime movie. Did I mention she gets her surgeries in Israel?