Emilia Pérez, then. It’s the film set in Mexico that angered a whole load of Mexicans. The film with a transgender lead that offended many trans viewers. And the film that was tipped to scoop up a bag load of Oscars – a whopping 13 nominations! – before everything came crashing down around revelations that the aforementioned lead had made some truly hideous comments on social media several years ago.
From Academy darling to toxic mess nobody wants to touch with a 10-foot statuette in the space of one short Oscars campaign. And now you expect me – a white cis male who has never even been to Mexico – to tell you why Emilia Pérez should win the award for best picture? There’ve been easier gigs.
Do I think that Emilia Pérez is the best film to come out in the last 12 months? Well, not exactly, no. But is it the wildest, bravest, silliest film? The one loaded with the most moments where you gasp “You can’t do that!” at the screen? Almost certainly. It is, after all, a musical revolving around a cartel leader who undergoes gender reassignment surgery in order to escape a violent past. There are choreographed dance moves around a chorus of “Man to woman/From penis to vagina” and an impassioned duet between a lawyer who was enlisted to make this all happen and the transphobic Israeli surgeon who agrees to do it. And that’s just the first half hour. Pretty soon, said cartel leader is living a new life as the titular Emilia, now looking after her kids as their aunt and living with former wife Jessi, all of them in the dark that this was once their murderous druglord husband and father. “I didn’t want it to be true to life,” said director Jacques Audiard in the promotional Netflix material. Ha ha, you can say that again Jacques!
Culture over the past decade has been so heavily guided by sensitive discussions around who gets to tell what story, that Audiard bowling up and riding roughshod over these new norms is tin-eared but also weirdly subversive. Set in Mexico but filmed in Paris? Telling a trans story through a cis writer? Audiard is asking us to consider if authenticity is the only thing that matters in storytelling.
Before the backlash there was a whole load of praise for Emilia Pérez and truly there is a lot to enjoy: in just over two hours the story encompasses film noir, telenovela, musical, melodrama and comedy (the extent of which is intentional I have no idea). It aims to tell a positive story about transitioning on the biggest of canvases. It is wildly inventive and ambitious. It is completely absurd and never, ever boring.
The film reminded me of two other artistic statements in recent pop culture. Firstly, the novel Detransition, Baby, in which the author Torrey Peters also gleefully barrelled over the understandable tentativeness that has emerged around discussing trans experiences. The difference, of course, is that Peters is a trans woman with lived experience and not a 72-year-old straight white male. And yet I couldn’t help but note that some of the things Emilia Pérez has been criticised for – such as depicting latent male aggression rearing up in Emilia – were also explored in Detransition, Baby.
The film also brought to mind Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous Poor Things, another man’s taboo-breaking take on the female experience. (And it should be noted that Emilia Pérez looks at womanhood from many angles – the frustrated lawyer Rita watching a man take all the credit for her work, the beaten and raped wife hoping that her husband has been murdered.) Defenders of Poor Things argued that we should not discount the creative input of lead actor Emma Stone. Can that argument not be extended, to some extent, to the cast of Emilia Pérez? After all, a trans woman read the script, identified with and helped make this film what it is.
All of these thoughts get tossed into the hot, messy brew that is Emilia Pérez, a wild, compelling mix of the divine and the ugly. The songs (written by French singer Camille) are beautiful, the lyrics clunky. The pace electrifying, but the frantic genre-jumping jarring. The musical elements are at times ludicrously inappropriate, at others weaved into the story with impressive subtlety. The message is both heartwarming – the desire to become who you really are, the quest for redemption – and clumsy. I watched it through all the emotions – and sometimes through my fingers. Why not throw caution to the wind and let this auteur’s reckless, radical statement triumph as best picture? After all, one thing is certain: there will never have been a winner quite like it.
