Suggested Topics :
Oscars 2025 | The Real Problem With 'Emilia Pérez' Is Its Form — The Musical
A favourite in the Oscar race, Jacques Audiard’s 'Emilia Pérez' is nominated for 12 Cesar Awards and 13 nods for the Academy Awards — the highest for any film this year, with Karla Sofía Gascón as the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.
France, now, has the distinguished honour of churning out not one, but two of the most unbearable musicals in the past few years — first Annette (2021), now Emilia Pérez. A special brand of unbearable that is receiving a special brand of acclaim — both films premiering and being awarded at Cannes — they wear their shock, like their mechanical hearts, on their sleeve, and forsake the excess of emotion for an excess of staging, thinking that distinction will blur. It does not.
Read More | From 'Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3' to 'Barzakh': The Range of Queer Desire on Screen in 2024
Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) is a Mexican mobster boss who takes the help of Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) to transition into a woman in the most clandestine manner, with discretion. Rita goes to a Bangkok clinic — where the infamous, campy earworm “Vaginoplasty? Yes! And penoplasty? Yes, yes!” takes place — and then consults a doctor in Tel Aviv — who says melancholically, that transition won’t “fix the soul” — before returning with notes of procedures, and the way forward. Manitas Del Monte becomes Emilia Pérez.
The “dead name” is literalised when Manitas stages her death, so Emilia can walk without the burdens of Manitas’ past. Emilia is not only an erasure of Manitas, but of the consequences of Manitas’ cartel — the lives lost in the mindless cartel wars.
A favourite in the Oscar race, Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is nominated for 12 Cesar Awards and 13 nods for the Academy Awards — the highest for any film this year, with Gascón as the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar. The film also became the most nominated non-English-language film at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards.
Read more | Oscars: Full List of Nominees
The claws were out against the film from the beginning — Mexicans thought the Mexican Spanish of Selena Gomez, who plays Manitas’ wife, Jessi Del Monte, left widowed and stranded in Switzerland with all the world’s money after Manitas’ “death”, was awful, not to mention Audiard’s indifference to learning the language. For him, it was the musicality of the language that was important. This was also not the first time he filmed in a language he was unfamiliar with — take crime-drama Dheepan’s Tamil. “Not knowing the language gives me a quality of detachment. When I’ve directed in my own language, I get stuck on the details,” Audiard recently noted in an interview. This is the argument of authentic representation. In response to this film, a trans content creator Camila Aurora and screenwriter Héctor Guillén made a satirical musical Johanne Sacrebleu about France made in Mexico, starring Mexican performers.
Read More | The Journey of 'Sabar Bonda,' the First Ever Marathi-language Feature to Premiere at Sundance
Then, there are the issues regarding the representation of trans women. This film is roughly based on Boris Razon’s novel Écoute, but in Emilia Pérez the transition happens not because the cartel head wants to escape his life as it does in the text, but his body. But the transition into a woman in the film is accompanied by a shift in her moral compass, too — from a mobster she works to rehabilitate those affected by gang wars. The film dangles a very precarious, provocative, even troubling question — does she change genders to escape the deeds of her past? Is transition repentance? Audiard frames it more provocatively — “The question is, to what degree is Manitas still within her?” This is the argument of ethical representation. LGBTQ+ media advocacy group GLAAD declared that Emilia Pérez is “Not Good Trans Representation”.
The central itch with the film, though, is neither its ethical nor its authentic representation. There are ways films have flouted the moral demands we make on them, by channeling our desires elsewhere. Neither is it the film’s slapdash quality of cause and consequence, where it is not a chain of events as much as an explosion of scenes that are tethered loosely to one another without the conviction of coherence.
Read more | Oscars 2025: Netflix’s 'Anuja' Nominated For Best Live Action Short Film
The folly is the film’s relationship to its form — the musical. What is it that these angular, exaggerated flinging of limbs is giving shape to, except, exactly, only that — the angular, exaggerated flinging of limbs. Characters become shadows whose interventions are lifeless and consequences, limp — the musical form of the film becomes a skeleton, waiting to be flushed with flesh. Instead, it gets air.
“My pussy still hurts when I think of you,” is a line sprung from Gomez that emerges in the film so strangely, it can only be of comic relief — desire is dead in a film where flesh is absent. Emilia Pérez initially written for younger actresses, in the mid-20s to early 30s was recast, since Audiard realised he “needed for people to have history, and when you’re 25 years old, that’s difficult.” Of what use is history when the body it is supposed to be housed in is a porous thing?
Melodrama, as a genre, is often misunderstood — the heightened pitch at which it is performed is a renunciation of realism, but not of real feelings. Ache, jealousy, joy — these still exist in the realm of the screeched life. They just get metastasised into something larger. Films like Emilia Pérez by dusting their hands off realism, have dusted their hands off truth itself. It plays out like a false film, full of mannequins with force-fitted musicality. The exhausting, and offending part of the whole project is the pretension the film has of social commentary, glazed by its metallic look, which leaves an aftertaste of ore.
If the film stays afloat, it is because of the kinetic charisma of Zoe Saldaña. Usha Iyer often makes the point that we fixate too much on the face and not the body’s movements to discern a good performance. To see Saldaña move her limbs in sharp, sudden, clean moves, is to watch the deflated songs be resuscitated, the empty film being slashed with bone, the whoosh of her rapid movements and the whipping turn of her tight braid — like a third arm — as anchors. When she vanishes from the film, the film vanishes from itself.