This feels like an unironic attempt to create a “Springtime For Hitler” for the twenty-first century.
There are cinematic oddities, and then there is Emilia Pérez, a film so layered in contradictions it’s hard to know where to start. Directed by Jacques Audiard – who neither speaks Spanish nor has ever set foot in Mexico – it’s a Spanish-language musical crime drama about a Mexican drug lord undergoing gender transition, shot almost entirely in a French studio with a cast largely devoid of Mexican actors. It’s an almost wilfully bewildering creative choice, one that might have worked as a bold, expressionist piece of outsider art if it didn’t feel so brazenly detached from the lived realities it claims to represent. In many ways, it shares the same problem as The Apprentice did – who is this movie for?
At the heart of the film is the story of a feared cartel leader, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), who decides to flee his violent past and transition into Emilia Pérez. The transformation is aided by Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a beleaguered lawyer roped into facilitating this drastic reinvention, and Jessi (Selena Gomez), the wife of Manitas, who is unaware of his plans to transition. Gomez, in particular, deserves credit for committing to the role, even going so far as to learn Spanish for the performance – an effort that stands in stark contrast to the film’s otherwise artificial sense of place and culture.
The film’s reception has been as polarised as its premise is baffling. Critics have lavished it with praise, culminating in an astonishing 13 Oscar nominations, while audiences have largely reacted with confusion, frustration, or outright hostility. And it’s not hard to see why. On one hand, it’s undeniably ambitious, a work of audacious cinematic theatre that refuses to be neatly categorised. On the other, it’s a deeply disjointed experience that constantly undermines itself with artistic choices that feel performative rather than profound.
The most immediate controversy stems from its handling of trans identity. The decision to cast Gascón, a transgender actress, in the lead role is a rare instance of authenticity in a film that otherwise feels strangely detached from its own subject matter. While this could have been a progressive step forward, the film’s approach to trans identity still raises eyebrows – not least because it often prioritises its exploitative aesthetic over a meaningful engagement with the lived realities of trans individuals. Rather than lending a voice to an underrepresented experience, Emilia Pérez instead co-opts it as a vehicle for its own artistic ambitions. The film presents itself as a progressive piece, but Audiard’s prejudices infuse every frame, shaping the narrative in ways that feel less like an authentic exploration and more like an outsider’s abstraction of identity and transformation. Rather than feeling like a genuine attempt to engage with its subject matter, the film’s choices appear orchestrated to provoke discussion rather than deepen understanding, making it more a spectacle of intention than a meaningful engagement with lived experiences.
Then there’s the setting, or rather the lack of it. Despite being a film ostensibly about Mexico and its socio-political realities, it was shot in France, in studios designed to approximate an idea of Mexico conjured from a distance. There’s a surreal theatricality to it all, but not in the way Audiard likely intended. Instead of heightening the story’s operatic grandeur, the artificiality only reinforces the film’s sense of detachment. It’s a Mexico conjured from crime thrillers, newspaper headlines, and second-hand impressions rather than lived experience.
Beyond these glaring representational issues, Emilia Pérez also trivialises one of Mexico’s most urgent humanitarian crises. The ongoing epidemic of missing persons—tens of thousands of individuals lost to cartel violence and systemic corruption—is treated here as mere background noise, its victims reduced to set dressing in a story that centres a perpetrator’s redemption arc. Instead of reckoning with the suffering and trauma this crisis has wrought, the film repurposes it into melodramatic spectacle, further underscoring its detachment from the reality it claims to depict.
Emilia Pérez is an exhausting tonal tightrope walk. It veers wildly between hardboiled crime thriller, intimate character study, and full-blown musical spectacle, never quite settling into a rhythm that makes sense. The musical numbers – strange, jarring interludes – serve less as emotional peaks and more as disorienting interruptions. There’s an argument to be made that this unpredictability is part of the film’s charm, that it is intentionally destabilising. But that would be more persuasive if it felt like Audiard himself had a clear idea of what he was trying to say, or even that he had a reason for saying it beyond being provocative.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Emilia Pérez is its near-universal critical acclaim. With its armful of Oscar nominations and glowing reviews from festival circuits, it has somehow captivated the very institutions it seems least suited to impress. And yet, outside of those circles, general audiences have been far less receptive, many expressing confusion over what, exactly, they were meant to take away from the experience. It’s a film that demands attention but resists engagement, a spectacle that insists on its own profundity without ever earning it.
Like The Apprentice, Emilia Pérez feels like a film in love with the idea of transformation – only this time of bodies and genders rather than the corruption of the soul – but without the clarity or authenticity to make that transformation resonate. It is, in its way, a fascinating misfire, one that might inspire endless academic essays but little in the way of genuine connection. Whether it will be remembered as a bold, misunderstood masterpiece or a well-meaning but spectacularly misguided experiment remains to be seen. But for now, one thing is certain: it’s one of the most confounding films of the year.
