Tim Robey is a film critic for the Daily Telegraph.
THREE KEY FACTS
Jacques Audiard’s controversial musical Emilia Pérez has netted 13 Oscar nominations, becoming the most nominated foreign-language film in history.
The film has faced backlash for its portrayal of trans people and representation of Mexican culture.
It won four Golden Globes in January, including Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy.
Depending on who you ask, the audacious cartel musical is transphobic, an insult to Mexico, and not as good as Wicked. But is that fair?
With 13 Oscar nominations and at least three probable wins, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez hardly needs additional praise at this point. That’s lucky, since most people would rather be caught dead than bestow any.
At the stage in awards season where basking in acclaim is supposed to occur, this film is such backlash bait it’s like a sacrificial cow floundering in a shark enclosure.
For those yet to be familiarised with Emilia, here goes.
As played by Best Actress contender Karla Sofía Gascón – the first trans acting nominee in history – she starts out within the story as Manitas, a once-feared cartel boss in Mexico, who fakes his own death with the help of a lawyer (Zoë Saldaña) and disappears.
After transitioning, she rebuilds her life, and sets up a foundation to recover the bodies of former cartel victims.
It may just have become the most nominated foreign-language film in the history of the Oscars, but Emilia’s script, plot, acting and direction have been roundly discredited from every angle you could imagine. If you’re Mexican, it’s racist. If you’re trans, it’s transphobic. If you know musicals, it’s ignorant of the genre. If you felt like garnishing a dazzlingly performed loathing of the film with all of the above and more, there are plenty of valid criticisms to go around.
Zoe Saldaña and Karla Sofía Gascón in Emilia Pérez (2024). Photo / Netflix
Audiard, never previously much of an Academy favourite, has somehow managed to write and direct the most divisive Best Picture wannabe since Green Book – the 2019 Civil Rights drama accused of being “the worst best picture Oscar winner since Crash”. In fact, those professing horror at this haul of nominations, the same number as Gone with the Wind or Mary Poppins, had better watch out. The last time they hissed and raged so much about the taste of Oscar voters, it was, indeed, against Green Book, and those lectures became so grimly strident that the Academy rebelled and picked it.
If true-blue haters of Emilia Pérez really wanted it to go away, they’d be better off just shrugging. Alas, hating this film has become a kind of industry, with reputations to be made off the back of it. Just this week, a Mexican cast and crew retaliated against Emilia with a short spoof called Johanne Sacrebleu. In exaggeratedly silly French accents, wearing berets and Breton stripes, they do clichéd French things on pavements, breaking into song between smoking Gauloises and arguing intensely.
You get the point after two minutes. (I wouldn’t bother with all 28.) This spoof does reflect the widespread dismay and ridicule Audiard’s film has attracted in the country where it is set. He made the potentially disastrous admission that he hadn’t researched anything to do with Mexico’s cartel wars, the hundreds of thousands of murdered or disappeared among the country’s citizens, prior to writing his script, or shooting it, which he did wholly in France.
Casting controversies have compounded the view that Audiard is peddling inauthentic tourism. The highest-profile Mexican actor in the film is Adriana Paz, who has the fourth biggest role. Gascón is Spanish, while the US-born Saldaña is three-quarters Dominican and a quarter Puerto Rican. Selena Gomez, who plays Manitas’s “widow” Jessi, has Mexican grandparents who emigrated to Texas in the 1970s, but she hadn’t spoken Spanish since she was 7, and her attempts to relearn it for this part have not endeared her to Hispanic viewers. “Selena is indefensible,” claimed Mexican comedy star Eugenio Derbez about her accent on a podcast. “I did the best I could with the time I was given,” responded Gomez on social media, classily taking the higher road, rather than simply reminding us, as I would have done, how abysmally unconvincing Derbez was as a music teacher in the 2021 Best Picture winner, CODA.
(L-R) Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramírez, Selena Gomez, Jacques Audiard, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Zoe Saldana, winners of the Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy award for “Emilia Pérez,” pose in the press room during the 82nd Annual Golden Globe Awards. Photo / Getty Images
Audiard has found it hard to counter the more sweeping argument: that he has exploited Mexican culture as a ready-made backdrop of taco stalls and prisons, while only purporting to engage with the country’s political woes.
There were petitions on change.org for the film to be denied a release in Mexico altogether. Audiard apologised in a press conference “if there are things that seem shocking” in the film, though not for the lyrics Emilia’s young son sings to her, about the scent of her skin that reminds him of Manitas: “You smell like spicy food, spicy spicy. Mezcal and guacamole”.
With apologies to the makers of Johanne Sacrebleu, it would be hard to parody the lyrics of a French screenwriter imagining a Mexican child’s words better than that.
Emilia obviously applies its Mexican-ness with a broad brush. The most basic defence is to point out that it’s a musical fantasy, springing off stereotypes about drug cartels in the same way that, say, West Side Story uses shorthand and – yep – clichés to depict gang violence among Puerto Rican immigrants.
It’s interesting that trash auteur John Waters (along with fellow fans James Cameron and Guillermo Del Toro) picked the film in his top 10 for last year, because it suggests he latched onto the more ridiculous elements and had no problem with them. Indeed, he called it “The Rocky Cartel Horror Picture Show.”
The musical form routinely leans on cliché, archetype, and mythic convention. That’s to say, to treat Emilia as a hard-hitting sicario drama that fails through inauthenticity is simply not meeting it on its own terms.
And yet … what are those terms? Lovers of musicals are up in arms, too. Despite being nominated for a total of three Oscars, the score has been widely derided as gloomy, unmemorable and poorly performed. (Wags have suggested that the producers of this year’s Oscars have dropped musical performances from the ceremony in order to spare the Emilia Pérez cast the indignity of singing their two nominated numbers live).
Formally speaking, though, it’s not your standard musical. Audiard conceived the film originally as an operetta with a two-act structure, explaining a lot of the speak-singing, with actors putting a musical lilt to their dialogue rather than fully belting it out.
This is an acquired taste but it’s certainly on purpose; the Wicked fans carping “it’s not even a proper musical!” are betraying limited imagination in terms of the genre’s scope and obligations.
Zoe Saldana (R) and husband Marco Perego-Saldaña attend a photocall during the "Emilia Perez" premiere at The National Museum of Cinema on December 2, 2024 in Turin, Italy. Photo / Getty Images
Those who airily combine such gripes with “and it’s racist to Mexico!” are guilty of not thinking through their position too smartly, since it comes within a hair’s breadth of saying “I might forgive the cultural appropriation if it had more bangers”.
Then again, what trans viewers have made of Emilia as a character ought to make even its staunchest defenders pause to think. Far from embracing what Audiard certainly intended as a progressive message, the American anti-defamation alliance, GLAAD, has denounced the film as both “a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman” and “a step backward for trans representation”.
The primary charge is that Emilia buries her past (psychopathic, male) self by using gender reassignment as a form of disguise. The film’s fixation on the process of surgery, including a “pocket mirror” shot after her vaginoplasty, has also been heavily critiqued for training a very retrograde lens on the private details of trans experience.
A heavy majority of trans viewers and critics reject the character, find her duplicity hard to take, and then find themselves on common ground with Mexican critics when she’s sanctified: this glib finale, in a helter-skelter third act that doesn’t gel at all, feels particularly unearned.
Zoe Saldaña in Emilia Pérez.
All of these points do hold. In the wobbly collision of multiple genres Audiard has orchestrated, Emilia as a character feels trapped in the wreckage. It’s only down to the regal poise and luminescence of Karla Sofía Gascón that she manages to cling onto our sympathies.
As such, it’s the disproportionate hostility levelled towards Gascón, before and after her Oscar nomination, that indicates how unusually venomous the Emilia backlash has become. Common-or-garden transphobes have obviously weighed in despising her, some with death threats. But the defence, support and endorsement she ought to expect from the progressive left is being withheld, because, after so much flak from so many quarters, no one dares defend anyone involved with Emilia Pérez. (Gascón has also been the subject of sniping thanks to reports that her singing voice was enhanced with AI.)
“Being LGBT doesn’t make you less of an idiot,” Gascón has lashed back, understandably, as the attacks on the film even from that angle have gained a personal edge. Saldaña has been caught in a crossfire of her own, with photos resurfacing, on the day of her nomination, to remind us all helpfully that she darkened her skin and wore prosthetics to portray Nina Simone in 2016.
zoe’s performance has the most GIVE ME AN OSCAR energy and for that reason I hope she doesn’t get one lol I’m still mad about NINA, I suppose!
Liking the film (I’m a long way from loving it) was more fun in the melee of Cannes last year. Even if plenty dissented, it was the kind of high-wire auteur provocation that the festival needs; it could be argued over honestly, limitations admitted, redeeming features, too. It’s the exhausting scrutiny of awards season that, in my mind, it was never built to withstand.
How it has got this far is genuinely baffling: I’d probably have axed its nominations down to three or four, and the venting against it (outside Academy circles, anyway) would simmer down. Somewhere along the way, I’ve noticed people cringing their way from the increasingly unpopular “pro” camp into the “anti” gang, which keeps critics out of hot water while the film looks worse. (Repeat viewings at home do it no favours, either.)
Setting Emilia’s obvious flaws aside, though, the real flashpoint for trans representation here involves an actress gaining recognition – not a fictional cartel boss who semi-plausibly transitions. If we’re talking about backward steps, whether you indulge the film to a degree or loathe it totally, the most damaging one of all must be denying Gascón her moment.
