The march of triumph for Jaques Audiard’s Emilia Perez started at the Cannes Film Festival, where all the actresses of the film– Zoe Saldana, Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón and Adriana Paz—won the Best Actress Award as an ensemble. To date the film has won 62 awards and 151 nominations, and recently swept four awards at the Golden Globes, out of the 10 for which it was nominated in the Best Musical/Comedy category, making it the second most nominated film in Golden Globes history. The Oscars are still to go.
Meanwhile, if Emilia Perez, the flamboyant musical about gender identity is awards bait, it is also being criticized for its messy portrayal of a trans character, the implication being that a cisgender writer-director is incapable of an accurate or sensitive portrayal of trans characters.
In the Spanish language film, set in Mexico, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldanha), is an underpaid and undervalued lawyer, whose “idiot” male boss makes her slog and steals credit for her work. Violence against women is a harsh reality of the country, where murders of women are passed off as suicide and she is frustrated with the situation she is in, where men are forgiven and misery is embraced, as she sings in the fabulous, surreal opening number.
Then she gets a mysterious call from a raspy voice, and when she reaches the meeting point, she has a bag pulled over her head and is taken to a hideout, where she comes face to face with the dreaded cartel boss, Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascon)—a rough-looking man, with greasy hair, scruffy beard, scars, tattoos and gold teeth. He has a strange request—for a huge amount of money, Rita has to facilitate his transition from man to woman. He has been taking hormone pills, and when he opens his shirt, Rita flinches. She takes on the assignment, because she really has no choice—he won’t get her leave after she knows his secret.
She travels the world looking for a suitable surgeon—a song, The Vaginoplasty is filmed in a clinic, as medical staff and patients, twirl about listing the various processes for the “man to woman” gender change process, including the tongue-twister chongrolaryngoplasty, to remove the Adam’s apple. In a not so subtle comment on Rita’s mannish appearance, the doctor asks if it is for her. Her single status at 40 is made fun of in a later scene.
She finally finds a doctor who agrees to perform the long and painful procedure, when in an honest meeting with the sceptical surgeon, Manitas convinces him that he is a genuine case of body dysmorphia. The surgeries done, Manitas stages his death and emerges as a beautiful woman named Emilia Perez. In a brilliant bit of casting, Audiard gave the role to a real trans woman, who went on to become the first Best Actress winner at many awards events. The grieving widow, Jessica (Selena Gomez) and children are relocated to Switzerland for their safety.
Then comes the twist, Emilia misses her children, tracks Rita to London, and tells her to facilitate their return to Mexico, and live with Manitas’s distant “cousin.” Emilia is more affectionate a mother to the kids than their real mother, and Rita has to warn her that she is the kids’ aunt, not their mother, so, not to cling to them so much.
A chance meeting with a woman looking for her missing son makes Emilia realise that so many men and women are missing in Mexico due to the cartels. Again with the help of Rita, she sets up an NGO called La Lucecita, to trace the remains of the missing and bring closure to anguished families. But can the past Manitas chose and benefited from be wiped out by Emilia’s desire for redemption? Again, how genuine is this need to clear this slate of sins, when Emilia is willing to accept funds from criminals and crooked politicians for the NGO. For once, Rita is given due credit for her efforts, and stands by Emilia’s side before the adoring press and public.
But can a woman’s body disguise a man’s true nature? Or for that matter, his scent? One of the children sings of Emilia smelling like Papa. (“You smell like papa—tequila and guacamole, leather and cigars” ). For this gender confusion, or rather oversimplification, Audiard has been criticised. Emilia still controls the family, she cannot accept that Jessica has found another man, and uses violence to demand “my children.” Like a typical male, when Jessica wants to marry her lover, Emilia cuts off her finances. However, Emilia herself embarks on an affair with a woman, Epiphania (Adriana Paz) without guilt.
Even with attempts to atone for some of Manitas’s misdeeds, Emilia cannot escape her violent past as a man. Divested of the power his discarded name generated on the streets, Emilia eventually succumbs to the very terror and savagery that Manitas had unleashed in his days as cartel boss. But as a macho man, did he have any feminine traits at all? Audiard does not say.
There are questions of what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be a man, and the aspect of the film that has upset many critics. Harron Walker writes in TheCut.com, ” Despite agreeing to do the procedures, the surgeon suggests that instead of having plastic surgery, “he,” meaning Emilia, “better change his mind,” adding that although the surgeon can change Emilia’s body, “you cannot change the soul.” To this, Rita argues, “Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.” There, I guess, is a Monkey’s Paw morsel of realism: two cis people debating the ethics of transness without any trans people present. The film’s perspective doesn’t cleave neatly to either side of this socratic debate. On the one hand, it affirms Emilia’s claim to womanhood, to a ridiculous degree at times. (Both Rita and Emilia talk about Manitas, Emilia’s pre-transition self, as if “he” were a different person.) On the other, it presents Emilia as a nesting doll of gendered selves. She is a woman trapped in the body of a man, then a woman in denial of the man she still harbors within. There’s a cruelty to this portrayal of a trans woman, as if the filmmaker blames her for failing to accept herself for all that he believes her to be.”
The final images of a helpless Emilia, brutalized and bleeding, trying to convince Jessica of who she really is, can also be interpreted to mean that in patriarchal societies like Mexico, being a woman is to live in constant danger, so a man becoming a woman does not really change society, it merely rearranges the baggage of power and victimhood on the carousel.
(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal, dated January 10, 2025)
