“Emilia Pérez” is quickly becoming an awards-show favorite, raking in four Golden Globe wins and 13 Oscar nominations — plus SAG Award nods, too.
The sweeping Spanish-language operatic musical defies easy categorization, as star Karla Sofía Gascón acknowledged in an interview for Netflix’s Tudum blog in January.
“You have an action movie that’s not an action movie, a drama that’s not a drama, a comedy that’s not a comedy,” she said.
Gascón plays dual roles in the gritty film: first, that of Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a murderous Mexican gang leader who dreams of living openly as a woman.
The cartel kingpin recruits a lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), to help her fake her own death and secretly obtain gender-affirming care — and at last, her new, authentic self, Emilia Pérez, is born.
However, Emilia cannot completely escape her violent origins, and when her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), comes back into the picture, past and present collide in tragic ways.
Some critics and filmmakers have raved about French director Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical, with Variety calling the movie “dazzling” and fellow director Michael Mann calling it a “contemporary masterpiece.”
However, many viewers have criticized the Netflix film for its lack of cultural authenticity and its transgender representation.
Transgender representation
LGBTQ media advocacy group GLAAD, in a scathing critique on its website, called the movie a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman” and a “step backward for trans representation.”
“‘Emilia Pérez’ recycles the trans stereotypes, tropes, and clichés of the not-so-distant past,” the November post states.
Some critics argue the movie perpetuates harmful trans stereotypes and the narrative that transitioning is a form of deception.
“Its protagonist’s transition is seen as duplicitous and dishonest, an act of manipulation through which she continues her selfish attempts to control those that she abandoned,” Mattie Lucas wrote in a November review for Trans | Cendental Cinema. “Not only is her transition portrayed as more of a disguise to evade the authorities, it’s an act of continued selfishness that ends up destroying not only her own life, but the lives of those she loves.”
Film critic Juan Barquin called the movie “a regressive picture masquerading as progressive” and criticized the way masculinity and femininity were portrayed in the film.
“Any time Emilia ‘reverts’ to her ‘old ways,’ Gascon lowers her vocal register as if to equate masculinity with evil and femininity with good,” Barquin wrote for Little White Lies magazine.
Several critics and viewers, including Barquin, also took issue with one line from the movie in which Emilia describes herself as “half male, half female.”
Some transgender commentators shared counterpoints and defended the film’s representation of its trans protagonist.
Journalist and critic Mey Rude, who is trans, rejected the argument that Emilia uses a “male voice” in moments of anger.
“She simply is a woman with a lower register, and when she gets angry, it shows,” Rude wrote in a piece for Out Magazine.
Rude also argues that the film does not lean into “harmful trans tropes about trans women being deceptive or liars.”
“Emilia isn’t a liar because she’s trans, she’s a liar because she’s a bad person and she’s in many ways, afraid,” Rude wrote. “The movie shows that if you live a lie, whether you’re trans or not, your lies will catch up with you.”
Writer Julie River, who is trans, argues in a piece for Out Front magazine that Emilia is portrayed sensitively as a “morally complex” character who makes “a desperate attempt to atone for her sins in her former life.”
River also argues that Emilia hides her transition not because the movie is painting trans people as duplicitous, but because as a cartel leader, Emilia “was hardly surrounded by people who were easy to come out to or who were likely to accept her transition.”
River added, “I may be amongst the minority in the LGBTQ+ community doing this, but I’ll be applauding it for every award it wins.”
Gascón herself has pushed back at people calling her “Emilia Pérez” character transphobic.
“There are some that say, ‘I want to see LGBTQ or trans characters outdoing what people do in real life,’ but we do bad things too … I don’t understand the criticism about the representation of portraying Emilia Pérez this way,” she told Vanity Fair in January. “The reality is that the trans experience is not the same for everybody — my trans experience is different from somebody else’s.”
“If you don’t like it, go and make your own movie,” Gascón also said. “Go create the representation you want to see for your community.”
Cultural authenticity
Some have questioned why the movie was not filmed in Mexico, despite being set there, and why it features no Mexican leads. Per the Hollywood Reporter, most of the movie was filmed on a sound stage in Paris, save for five days of exterior shots in Mexico.
Others have criticized the language skills of Gomez, who is not fluent in Spanish, and questioned why the film was directed by Audiard, who is French and, as he confirmed to The New York Times, doesn’t speak Spanish.
Audiard also faced criticism after revealing he did not do much research on Mexico while making the film.
“How much did you have to study Mexico to be able to make this film?” an interviewer asked him in a clip making the rounds on social media.
“I didn’t study much,” Audiard says through a translator, according to a translation by NBC News. “What I had to understand, I knew,” he says in French.
“Emilia Pérez” won four Golden Globes on Jan. 5, including two best picture awards in the musical/comedy and non-English language categories, which sparked controversy online.
“Frenchman — who speaks no Spanish or English — wins award for France for a film in Spanish, based in Mexico but filmed in France, about a Mexican cartel leader,” Mexican American journalist Tomás Mier wrote on X the day after the Golden Globes.
Mexican actor and singer Mauricio Martínez also criticized Audiard’s self-admitted lack of research about Mexico for the film, and slammed the movie in an X post for “portraying a Mexico full of stereotypes, ignorance (and) lack of respect.”
Film critic Ana Iribe also took issue with the movie’s lack of research and the way it portrayed violence in Mexico.
“It’s the lack of info that makes it insensitive: we don’t want a white French director to portray the violence we have to face every day,” she wrote on X. “I’m not opposed to foreign artists making films about other countries, as long as they have good research, and EMILIA PÉREZ didn’t have that.”
While “Emilia Pérez” takes place in Mexico, the film’s leads are not from Mexico.
Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, is from Spain; Zoe Saldaña, who plays Rita, is from the U.S. with Dominican and Puerto Rican ancestry; and Selena Gomez is from the U.S. with Mexican and Italian heritage.
In one notable exception, supporting cast member Adriana Paz, who plays Emilia’s lover, Epifanía, is from Mexico.
Paz defended the movie in an interview with IndieWire.
“I’ve heard people saying it’s offensive to Mexico. I really want to know why, because I didn’t feel that way. And I have questioned some people that I trust, not just as artists but as people, and they don’t feel that way, so I am trying to understand,” Paz said, adding that she feels the movie’s director is a “genius.”
In November, casting director Carla Hool said during a SAG-AFTRA panel that she and her team “did a big search” for actors across Mexico, the United States, Spain and “all Latin America” but did not find any Mexican actors suitable for the main roles.
“We wanted to keep it really authentic, but at the end of the day, the best actors who embodied these characters are the ones that are right here,” she said, gesturing to Gascón, Gomez and Saldaña on the panel beside her. “So we had to figure out how to adjust authenticity … with the accents, and them not necessarily being native Mexican.”
