‘Emilia Pérez’ TIFF Review: Exploitative Trash in Operatic Form

✯

An opera by way of French filmmaker Jacques Audiard could promise one thing, but even pointing down where his influences come forth for Emilia Pérez might send you down a deeper rabbit hole. But I think that there’s only a handful of cishet filmmakers that I can trust with making a movie based around a drug lord in Latin America who comes out as a trans woman. Frankly, I can’t say that Jacques Audiard is one of those people, especially if a film like Emilia Pérez is the final result. This movie supposedly positions itself as a life-affirming story, yet it’s also rooted in a very deep hatred that only sours the experience.

Zoe Saldaña stars as Rita Moro Castro, an attorney living in Mexico City with a knack for keeping her clients, many of whom are notably criminals, out of prison. Soon it becomes clear that this catches the attention of a violent drug kingpin who has been secretly undergoing a gender transition, in order to help her realize a new identity as Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofia Gascón). But it becomes clear that Emilia’s past life is slowly catching up to her, especially as Emilia’s former wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two sons are also dragged into this mess. Of course, it’s all presented in a manner that’s very operatic, but that can only bring Audiard’s ambitions so far.

It all starts with how this film views transness, especially that of its title character. Emilia Pérez is constantly deadnamed and misgendered by people around her, even one of the film’s many musical numbers seems dead set on referring to her own past, as prior to this new life that she lives for herself. It feels like this film is built around talking down Emilia Pérez in order to remind her of her past circumstances. But there’s no real drive to interrogate these circumstances, let alone why there’s such a transphobic attitude towards the presence of someone who wishes to move out of a past life or identity in a condescending manner.

While I’m not of the opinion that only trans people can tell stories of trans people on the screen (I point back to Sean Baker’s brilliant Tangerine as a perfect example of such), I think that it certainly cannot be helped but felt that Jacques Audiard’s understanding of queerness at best is shallow, and at worst, deeply regressive. It feels bad enough that Emilia Pérez builds most of its identity on many tropes surrounding transgender people that have been perpetuated by popular media for so long, but reversing such tropes to create a character for viewers to sympathize with isn’t the life-affirming transformation that Audiard sees it to be: one that unfortunately Karla Sofia Gascón feels beholden to in ways that she does not deserve.

Given the origins of Emilia Pérez as an opera libretto, you can also expect that musical numbers will be part of the ride. But they’re all very awkwardly placed and weirdly stilted, to a point where they almost feel like a distraction to the story being told. Most confounding, though, is the manner in which the songs are all delivered: supposedly owing to the fact that Audiard’s greatest influences come from telenovelas which perpetuate very romantic dialogue. In this context, though, being a film all about a trans woman and her own relationship to a drug cartel, it just feels very jarring – and they never transcend the feeling of being a stereotype.

Obviously, much of the heavy lifting in Emilia Pérez falls on the shoulders of its actresses. For someone like Zoe Saldaña, it’s easy enough for her to fit within this role because she’s giving this movie everything that she possibly can. The real star, though, despite the risible material that she’s working with, is Karla Sofia Gascón, who’s always a compelling screen presence, but much like Selena Gomez’s Jessi, feels like a character left off to the side. After all, this story primarily belongs to Saldaña, who’s the character that watches over everything happening in Emilia’s life.

It might just as well be enough that Emilia Pérez is bad, but it’s a very peculiar sort of bad film in that every moment of it that takes one big swing, supposedly aiming for a more life-affirming turn, would hit you with more of the same things that we’d have grown out of in recent memory. Especially as our understandings of trans narratives go further beyond people being pitied, or even as perversions to the world around. Granted, trans perspectives on media surrounding their representation won’t be so monolithic, but frankly, I think that for a movie like Emilia Pérez, it just feels like an amalgamation of so much of what has been done before. Suddenly making it an opera won’t hide that away.

Watch the trailer right here.

All images via Netflix.

Directed by Jacques Audiard
Screenplay by Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Léa Mysius, Nicolas Livecchi, based on the opera libretto by Audiard and the novel Écoute by Boris Razon
Produced by Jacques Audiard, Pascal Caucheteux, Valérie Schermann, Anthony Vaccarello
Starring Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, Édgar Ramirez
Premiere Date: May 18, 2024 (Cannes)
Running Time: 132 minutes