All My Thoughts on 'Emilia Pérez'

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I’m sitting now at John F. Kennedy International Airport waiting to board my flight to Mexico City, where I will be for several weeks. In the interest of being let into the country, I will be holding off on publishing this piece about Emilia Pérez until I’ve made it to my domicile. Not that I have many nice things to say about Emilia Pérez, mind you, but relations between our countries have been strained, and something about having a recent Emilia Pérez piece publicly attached to my name feels like a liability, like announcing that I love selling, doing, and trafficking cocaine. There’s a chance the customs agent will ask me to disavow the film before allowing me through.

Emilia Pérez has been called many things: Offensive. Misguided. Overrated. Regressive queer representation. An inaccurate portrayal of Mexican culture. Musically unpleasant. Bad at Spanish. Honestly, it sounds a lot like me. I thought perhaps I would feel represented by it. The film having so many haters only intrigued me more. It brings me great joy to love something that everyone hates, and vice versa. There is a malevolence so ancient and terrible in me.

Now that I’ve seen it, it gives me no pleasure to say that the haters were right. Huge victory for the haters here. Emilia Pérez is not good. Though, allow me to play el abogado del diablo for a moment: I didn’t find it as bad as people are saying it is. Or, I guess I was braced for a lot worse. Emilia Pérez has, quite impressively, brought many different groups together to kick at its shins. GLAAD released a condemnation of it, citing multiple prominent transgender writers who eviscerated it. There’s been no shortage of Mexican critics either, calling it out for not casting Mexicans and for making light of the country’s plight of cartel violence. It goes without saying, but any film starring a trans actress is going to be condemned by the right. And then there's the biggest victims here: people who like musicals.

This is all to say that this movie was taking a mollywhopping from the most diverse political coalition since the Obama era even before offensive tweets from its lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, surfaced. I won’t list them here, but I will say it’s genuinely impressive she had so much time and vitriol on her hands (the two ingredients that make for all-time posters). She was also armed, it seems, with encyclopedic knowledge of every ethnicity under the sun. I would not have been surprised in the least if she’d tweeted disparagingly about the Enets, the indigenous tribe of some 350 individuals in Russia. If you identify yourself with an ethnic group, there is a Karla Sofía Gascón tweet addressed specifically to you.

None of this blowback would be happening had the film not racked up a truly bewildering thirteen Oscar nominations, making it the most nominated film of the year. Its critical success raises questions. Questions like: Why? and Did you watch it? I kind of feel bad for Emilia Pérez. I don’t think it was supposed to get this many accolades. They piled too many awards on it, and it’s collapsing under the weight of its trophies. It’s just not a movie that can hold up to this level of scrutiny.

What started as a victory march to the Oscars has become a somber mosey toward “lost media.” Am I a bad person if I say it makes me a little sad? Believe it or not, there’s some good stuff in Emilia Pérez. Sure, you have to ignore a mountain of real-world context to see it, but I come to the cinema to ignore real-world context. The context is so scary. The context is coming for me. The context is raising my egg prices and threatening to do trade wars. Will I be let back into our United States in March? Do I want to be? Hello?

Anyway, I spent over two hours watching Emilia Pérez, and I can’t stop talking about it, so here’s me taking the stand and interviewing myself about watching Emilia Pérez. There’s a lawyer in the movie, so this framing device works perfectly well.

Hello, myself. I love you.

Hello.

What is Emilia Pérez about?

Emilia Pérez is about a bored wealthy woman who launches a nonprofit with the mission of addressing the heinous violence she committed pre-transition. Named “La Lucecita,” the org reunites the corpses of victims of cartel violence with their living family members, something I imagine Emilia Pérez would be preternaturally good at, considering she knows the precise locations of all the mass graves.

So it’s about a woman reckoning with her past and finding redemption?

No. It’s just sort of something she wants to do with her time. She’s universally praised for doing so and she even has a nice feel-good commercial for the org where she stands side-by-side with women who’ve lost family members to the narco wars, wars that Emilia Pérez was winning. She was extremely good at winning the narco wars. I would endorse Emilia Pérez on LinkedIn for “winning the narco wars.”

Her crimes aren’t brought up at all?

No. I think this movie believes that transitioning makes you an entirely different person. Or maybe it thinks that ladies can’t do cartel violence. It is not a feminist film. It’s French.

It’s French?

Yes. Its director, Jacques Audiard, a French-ass name if ever there was one, the kind of name bestowed upon a mime wearing a beret or some shit, is on the record stating that he didn’t research anything about Mexico before making the film. Emilia Pérez makes zero sense if you approach it as a film about a Mexican woman, and perfect sense if you consider that France is maybe not totally over Cinco de Mayo. I wrote a piece for The Los Angeles Times in which I said Emilia Pérez is “a bit like if a Chilean director made a musical about the Jan. 6 insurrection and cast mostly Thai people.” I stand by that, and by the claim that I would watch and most likely enjoy that film.

Sure. How’s Zoë Saldaña in it?

Electric. I honestly thought she was great. What are you going to do? Arrest me? Shoot me? I loved watching her in it. She had some really memorable facial expressions. Oh, I suppose I should mention she’s sort of the actual lead of the movie. She plays Rita Mora Castro, a frazzled lawyer who gets hired by a narcotraficante to facilitate her transition. I wish the whole film had been a comedy about her frantically trying to accommodate Emilia’s gender-affirming surgeries. The best and funniest parts of the movie are in the first fifteen minutes. The first fifteen minutes are sort of like a movie from outer space, like if someone held a gun to an alien’s head and demanded that it make a movie. It was really unique, bizarre, and intriguing, like a lumpy, misshapen meteorite that’s simultaneously hot and cold to the touch.

Anyway, maybe this would have ended up being even more offensive, but I would have loved watching an entire movie about a ridiculously high-stakes “trans ally” situation where Rita is reading book after book about transitioning and about the trans experience because if she slips up even a little bit the most dangerous trans woman on earth will have her strangled with a plastic bag and unceremoniously dumped in an unmarked grave. But that’s not the movie I got. I very rarely get what I want.

What about Selena Gomez?

I am more afraid of Selena Gomez than El Chapo. Or, rather, I’m more afraid of her fans. I guess I’ll preface this by saying that Wizards of Waverly Place was very important to me. She’s doing something in this film I don’t quite understand. She plays Jessi, Emilia Pérez’s wife. Emilia, after faking her own death, has Jessi and their two kids sent to Switzerland, which is a whole thing I don’t feel like getting into. Jessi is written as being from the United States to explain away her accent, and, you know, I’m a No Sabo Kid myself, but Selena delivers her Spanish lines here like Emilia Clarke speaking High Valyrian in Game of Thrones.

There’s this part in the movie where Emilia Pérez, angered that Jessi is remarrying and moving their kids out of Emilia’s house, cuts off Jessi’s credit cards. While on the phone with Rita, Jessi shouts, “Todas mis cuentas están bloqueadas!” And I’ve been saying that a lot lately, even to people who have never seen Emilia Pérez. I really identify with it. Todas mis cuentas están bloqueadas! I feel that way.

Anything to say about the music?

I’m probably the only person on earth who’s gone back to listen to any of these songs after watching the movie. But I’ve revisited Rita’s song “Todo y Nada” and her duet with Emilia “Por Casualidad” because I’m tickled by them. “Por Casualidad” is especially fun to me. Rita is reunited with Emilia years after the latter’s surgeries at a restaurant in London and Rita immediately assumes Emilia is there to kill her (Emilia has killed a lot of people) but they work it out on the remix. Karla Sofía Gascón attempts a note here that soundly defeats her.

There’s also a song between Rita and the doctor in Tel Aviv (I don’t want to talk about it) wherein she, for some reason or another, has to convince a man whose job it is to do gender-affirming surgeries to do a gender-affirming surgery. The funniest part is that Rita enters queer ally mode and turns to the camera to say, “I won’t let you down” to the entire community. She’s doing this on behalf of a lady who, days prior, had one of her goons suffocate her a little with a plastic bag. I appreciate Rita’s steadfast support. She was nearly strangled to death but it didn’t shake her commitment to the LGBTQ+. Some people turn against the community because they put a gay person in a video game, so. GLAAD award incoming (ignore GLAAD’s official statement of condemnation).

Have you no comment on the ‘from penis to vagina’ line?

Oh, sure. This is the viral moment. Rita is in a surgery clinic in Bangkok where the surgeon is explaining the menu. I guess my only real question here is why Rita didn’t book the clinic in Bangkok. They seemed very enthusiastic and all the patients were singing and dancing quite happily. I was never given a good reason for not booking the Bangkok clinic. I don’t want to veer out of my lane here, but my trans friends have told me there are some real artistes over there. Honestly, it should shame America that our surgeons are being outcompeted, but I suppose our priorities have never really been in the right place.

How does it end?

Everyone is in a car that veers over a cliff and explodes. Emilia Pérez becomes a quasi-saint with a statue and everything that gets paraded around Mexico City like she’s Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is a common expression of support in Mexico. Mexicans love nothing more than making effigies and parading those effigies around. They do it with Goku and Lana Del Rey. Everything here is also seen through a sepia filter. If it weren’t yellowish, no one would know they were in Mexico. But this is definitely Mexico. There are mariachis and tacos and kidnappings on busy streets.

Emilia Pérez was filmed in France.

I guess that’s all I have to say. Adios. Or, as my abuelita would say, “dracarys.”