• Emilia Pérez

9/3/25 (Wed), plane

French director Jacques Audiard’s much-discussed flick about a transgender mob boss, played by a male-to-female transgender performer, didn’t immediately appeal to me despite all its awards and critical praise. I figured it would be a finger-wagging love-thy-trans-neighbor lecture. But a friend gave it such an enthusiastic review that I decided to give it a chance. I’m glad I did.

The setting is Mexico. Rita is a highly successful lawyer but disillusioned at having to find ways to twist the law to defend the rich and guilty. One day she gets a mysterious phone call promising her a fortune if she’ll take an unspecified job. When she shows up at the meeting spot, she is kidnapped, blindfolded, and transported to an unknown spot. She finds herself facing a notorious Mexican cartel boss, who has an unusual goal – he wants a sex change. He makes her a lucrative offer that she can’t refuse: he will pay her millions to make the operation happen quickly since his treatment is reaching a critical point. At the same time, it must be done in utter secrecy to avoid trouble with rival cartels, and he will need to “disappear” himself afterwards while sheltering his vast wealth. On top of that, to protect his wife and two children, he must make them think he has been murdered and get them to Switzerland, out of reach of his many vengeful enemies. The stunned lawyer realizes that, knowing his secret, she now has no option but to proceed. She eventually finds a doctor in Tel Aviv (a brave choice by the filmmaker in these times) who is willing to take the job.

We move forward four years. His dream fulfilled, the mob boss is now Emilia, living in anonymity somewhere in Mexico, and Rita is rich and happy in a new life and career in London. However, Emilia unexpectedly tracks down the lawyer with a new request. He misses his children terribly and wants her to bring the family back to Mexico, where he will pretend to be a distant relative of their father. Rita advises strongly against it, but Emilia can be persuasive in her not-so-gentle way.

The family reunites in Mexico. Emilia’s physical transformation is so complete that no one so much as suspects his/her identity, and things seem at first to be working out. He (I’m going with “he” for clarity) is not happy to learn from his unsuspecting wife, however, that she was having an affair during their marriage. Worse, when she tells him that she is planning to move in with her lover, taking the children with her, he becomes apoplectic at the prospect of losing his family once more. Events take an evil turn as his inner nature, untouched by the operation, erupts once more.

A striking feature is that the story, conceived originally as an opera, is interspersed with MTV-style musical sequences commenting on the action. The quality of the music itself, composed by French songwriter Camille, is best left unmentioned – did she really intend to write an opera?? – but that’s par for the course even for Broadway these days. The melody-free tunes were often semi-spoken or rapped rather than sung. The Academy Award for one of the songs says more about the Oscars than the song. While I can’t judge the Spanish lyrics, the writer deserves some sort of credit for her paean to vagina reconstruction (“La Vaginoplastia”), and the level elsewhere can be gleaned from the striking lyric, “My p*ssy still hurts just by thinking of you”, which I assume sounds better in Spanish. My favorite line is when the child sings nostalgically that his Auntie Emilia smells, like his long-lost papa, of tequila (mezcal) and guacamole, suggesting happily that the French are no more immune to Mexican stereotypes than Hollywood.

Nevertheless, the audacious musical concept and dynamic choreography lift the film to a different level. As a musical, the film is a bold reimagining of the material that I didn’t see coming and at least attempts to give more psychological depth to the characters. It thankfully doesn’t dwell on the transgender theme (diversity, acceptance, whatever) other than as a plot point. The story was well structured, plausible and engaging from start to finish. Even the inevitable violence at the end was justified and credibly presented. I wasn’t as taken by the lesbian detour (if that’s what you call it when a genetically-male female falls for an actual female), and I didn’t see the point of the woman ominously packing a knife that never reappears, a rebuke to Chekhov’s gun. But the script is otherwise tightly written, and writer/director Audiard does a great job of keeping events moving smoothly.

The film boasts tremendous performances by Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, and Selena Gomez as Emilia, Rita and the former gangster’s wife (ex-wife? widow?). They are all non-Mexican and were bashed for their accents, a legitimate criticism for Spanish speakers, though the script tries to account for that by suggesting that the latter two hailed originally from the Dominican Republic and US. In any case, no faulting their work acting-wise, including the musical sequences. Gascón’s chances at what would have been an historic Best Actress Oscar were derailed in ever-sensitive Hollywood by unflattering past Tweets perceived as racist and Islamophobic, which was unfortunate, but Saldaña won a well earned Best Supporting Actress award.

The movie itself has been criticized in some parts for its portrayal of Mexico – the French director admitted openly knowing little about the country and filmed the movie in France –and, more surprisingly, of transgenders. I’m sympathetic with the former charge since I’m often annoyed by misguided Hollywood portrayals of Japan, but complaints over a “white director” showing Mexico as violent seem overdone – how else would they portray the nation’s drug cartels? While I can’t comment on the transgender issue, the theme is more Emilia’s inability to escape her past feelings and innate psychological makeup regardless of her physical transformation. Gascón handled that beautifully.

I should have known better than to let the negative publicity from the perpetually offended get to me. A bold and inspired creation.

P.S. I saw the movie on a plane, where the summary was as follows:

“Risa is a lawyer at a large firm that is more interested in getting criminals off the hook than bringing them to justice. One day, she is given an unexpected way out.”

And that’s it. Rather misses the point, doesn’t it?