First feted then hated, Emilia Pérez got a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize. By the time the Oscars came around the tide had started running the other way, with its 13 nominations resulting in only two wins – Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña, plus Best Song (El Mal).
What had happened in the interim is a textbook case of a social media pile-on, some of it justifiable some of it not, which resulted in all sorts of apologies being given to the faceless blob for crimes against trans people, misrepresentation, the lack of actual Mexicans in the key roles in a film largely set in their country. And then there were the “racist” tweets by Karla Sofía Gascón.
Apart from the tweets (which I have not seen and am not going to go searching for), the other stuff could be bracketed as offences against authenticity. Gascón is Spanish, and is playing a Mexican drug boss who wants to become a woman. Co-stars Zoe Saldaña isn’t Mexican either (she’s from New Jersey, with Dominican and Puerto Rican parents), but plays the smart Mexican lawyer co-opted by cartel boss Manitas to help him become Emilia. While the also-not-Mexican Selena Gomez (Texas, with Italian and Mexican heritage) plays Manitas’s wife, a gangster’s moll with no clue that her husband wants to be a woman and takes his disappearance as her cue to re-ignite an affair with Gustavo (Edgar Ramírez), a guy so gifted in the bedroom that, as Jessi (Gomez) says, “my fucking vulva even hurts just thinking about you.”
Saldaña and Gomez’s Mexican accents don’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny and their characters’ histories have been tweaked accordingly. Director Jacques Audiard is French and made the film mostly in his home country, another notch on the tally stick if you’re keeping a score.
On the other hand this is a story about authenticity – is Manitas most himself when he’s a he or when she’s a she? And the casting of actors who don’t come from Mexico could be, if you were trying to build a case for an otherwise doomed client, part of the whole “inauthentic” vibe.
There is a lot going on here without authenticity being an isue. Audiard wants to tell a story about gender as destiny. As a man Manitas is a tough, kill-first-ask-questions-later crime boss; as a woman Emilia is all succour and mercy mild, eventually getting involved in a project to find the remains of people she disappeared when she was Manitas.
It’s comical, really, and Comedy is the keyword missing on the IMDb page when I had a look – Crime, Drama, it says. But it is definitely intended to be darkly funny, though done with a straight face and played to the hilt by all concerned, particularly by Saldaña, who is probably the film’s real lead, never mind the fact that she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
As to that Oscar for best song. I have not mentioned that Emilia Pérez is also a musical, particularly in its first half, and has ambitions to weld the verbal pyrotechnics of Sondheim (one chorus prominently features the word “vaginoplasty”) with the dance moves of Bob Fosse. Neither of these work particularly well. The songs are weak, the dance routines are half-hearted, but we get the idea. Audiard wants to cut the legs out from underneath whatever claims to realism the film might be staking. Authenticity again.
There is good stuff here. The performances are crackers. Saldaña’s relentless tweaking of Rita’s personality as she seeks the best outcome for herself. Gascón’s tough and tender turn as two sides of the same person. Gomez’s attempts to turn an identikit gangster’s moll into a real character. And Audiard should be praised for setting off in an affirmatory direction only to bring everything to a halt by asking the sort of questions social media does not like and cannot answer – is gender destiny, or is destiny not that easily co-opted?
In the end, though, the various intentions – to catalogue, entertain, thrill, amuse and interrogate – pull in too many different directions. This is a good film but a complex and not entirely satisfying one. Still, with Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet, Rust and Bone and Dheepan on the CV, I doubt Audiard is losing much sleep.
Emilia Pérez – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
