Emilia Pérez has an identity crisis Has Hollywood misread the film's mixed messages?

When the Oscar nominations were announced on Thursday, confirmation finally came of what many had been predicting for weeks: that Jacques Audiard’s trans, drug cartel musical Emilia Pérez had made history with 13 nominations to become the awards’ front-runner. Buoyed by terrific support within the Hollywood community — “a beautiful piece of filmmaking” said James Cameron, heading up a pack of fans that includes such luminaries as Guillermo del Toro, Paul Schrader, Nicole Holofcener, John Waters, Denis Villeneuve, Meryl Streep and Emily Blunt — the film has become, in the words of The Daily Telegraph’s Robbie Collin, a “giant middle finger for Trump”, at a time when Hollywood has fallen strangely silent over America’s new president, but wishes nevertheless to signal solidarity with those who have most to lose from his re-election.

What is stranger still is that, outside of Maréchal Le Pen’s posting about the film’s trans star, Sofía Gascón, on X “So a man has won the Best Actress prize…”, the criticism of the film has come from those it purports to represent. “Emilia Pérez is a glorious disaster,” wrote trans critic Drew Burnett Gregory, for Autostraddle, while GLAAD, a non-profit media monitoring organisation devoted to LGBTQ representation, called the film a “step backward for trans representation”. You mean to say that a song-and-dance number set in a sex-change clinic with nurses twirling their gurneyed patients around them, singing “Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!” isn’t the step forward the trans community have been waiting for? Huh. There’s no pleasing some people.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Hollywood rushes to self-congratulate over a terrible film about a marginalised group, while the group in question says, “will you please stuff it?”. Back in 2018, Green Book won at the Academy Awards only as it was simultaneously demolished by younger critics-of-colour for its retrograde white-saviour narrative — but the heat-haze of confusion around Emilia Pérez is revealing of the fact that the film is itself a very confused film. Like always breeds like at the movies — films labelled “divisive” are often so because they are divided against themselves. Emilia Pérez is really two films, the first of which was the one Audiard pitched to the film’s star when they first met in Paris to discuss the project, a libretto in four parts adapted from a chapter in Boris Razon’s Écoute, which introduced, in passing, the character of a drug trafficker who signs up for gender-affirming surgery in order to evade capture by the authorities.

“The day we met in Paris, he asked me, ‘What do you think?’” Gascón told Rolling Stone. “And I said, ‘I like this, I don’t like that, I like this, I don’t like that…’” Chief among the objections were that the trafficker transitions solely to flee justice. “The entire thing would’ve been a joke,” Grascon said, and suggested instead that Manitas transitions because his desire is sincere. “She led me to understand that, well before transitioning, we’re already what we want to become,” said Audiard and duly changed his script accordingly. That is the film that we see, by and large. The drug-lord fakes his own death, stashing his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two young sons in Switzerland, undergoes secret gender reassignment in Israel and, unbeknown to anyone but his lawyer, begins a new life as Emilia Pérez, a human-rights campaigner clad in Saint Laurent who atones for past wrongs by means of a charity locating the graves of the “disappeared”.

Is Pérez’s atonement sincere? It’s hard to say because we know next to nothing about what prompted it. Having eliminated all cynical motive from Pérez’s transition Audiard’s screenplay inadvertently creates a new problem for itself: why does a murderous drug trafficker jack in his highly lucrative trade? Audiard has no idea, except to imply that the moral redemption is somehow a consequence of the gender-reassignment. “Changing the body changes the soul,” argues the lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldana). “Changing the soul changes society.” It’s here that the film stirs up a whole bee’s nest of trouble for itself. For transitioning is rarely a moral or ethical choice; it’s the result of a dysphoria from which sufferers long to escape. (“I’m happy now,” says Emilia. “I’m myself.”) The only people for whom transitioning carries a moral charge are the trans community’s champions, for whom the cause of trans rights has the same halo of righteousness as that for any such social justice campaign.

In short, Emilia Pérez, as a character, is fashioned almost entirely from the imagined liberal audience’s feelings when contemplating trans women — and the problem with projecting onto others the feelings they inspire in us is that those feelings have a habit of coming unstuck. Whom we first deem a saint we later turn on as a demon. And so it proves in the second half of the film, where Emilia, missing her children, inserts herself incognito into the household of her widow Jessi in Mexico City, posing as an Aunt, only for the disguise to crumble. Emilia, in the middle of an argument with Jessi, throws her bodily onto a bed and chokes her using a man’s full strength and voice. It is this scene that has caused most problems with trans critics, understandably, because in terms of “representation”, it is not just unflattering, but something of a nightmare: an onscreen depiction of a trans woman who is “secretly”, underneath it all, still a man, possessed of a man’s murderous strength and instincts, who, when push comes to shove, snaps right back and plays dirty. “If he’s a he, she’ll be a he. If he’s a she, she’ll be a she,” says the Israeli surgeon who performs Emilia’s surgery. “If he’s a wolf, she’ll be a wolf.”

The implications of this hardly need spelling out. Emilia Pérez is a film which, for all its aura as a trans champion, comes down squarely on the side of those who argue that trans women should not be allowed access to women’s bathrooms, prisons or sports fields. “[The film] presents Emilia as a nesting doll of gendered selves,” wrote trans critic Harron Walker, perceptively. “She is a woman trapped in the body of a man, then a woman in denial of the man she still harbors within.” Far from being, as Hollywood seems to want to think, a champion of trans rights, the film lends strength to the argument of those women who fear for safe spaces and fight for sex-based rights.

It’s a measure of just how baffling the film is, and how effectively the musical numbers skate by any real psychological or moral depth, that it is hard to say what the intention was, exactly. I suspect that the musical form was chosen by Audiard for precisely this reason, in fact, to avoid answering questions that he sensed he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, answer. That doesn’t seem to be stopping it’s momentum: the academy loves a musical, particularly one that makes history. But there are so many better films in contention such as James Mangold’s terrific Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and Sean Baker’s excellent Anora, which has barely a naysayer out there? But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a remarkable tendency to mistake itself for the Nobel Peace Prize committee, and Emilia Perez is riding a train few will want to stand in front of.