By now, anyone and ever­yone associated with the award season rush will have known about the fantastic debacle of Emilia Pérez.

Nominated for a staggering 13 Oscar nominations, including nearly all major categories — a historic first for a foreign film — the film is a musical set in Mexico (though shot in a studio near Paris) that is made by a French director and stars a trans-person in the lead (Karla Sofía Gascón, aka the Emilia Pérez of Emilia Pérez). Given the international acclaim it has garnered in festivals and the award circuit, one wonders whether all of the recent hoopla has anything to do with the quality of the film itself.

To quickly recap: Gascón, who had been a front-runner in the Oscar Best Actress campaign, is presumably all washed up after Netflix, the film’s distributor, and the director, Jacques Audiard, distanced themselves from the actor. Old Islamophobic and racist tweets resurfaced from Gascón that denigrated everyone, be they Muslim or African-American, and criticised the diverse winners of the 2021 Oscars (“I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8-M”).

The streaming giant stated that they will not cover the cost of Gascón’s campaign expenses, and the director pointed out the self-harm — and in broad retrospect, the damage — that Gascón is putting the film through.

Gascón’s apology, issued in a statement by Netflix a day after the tweets surfaced, was deemed only skin-deep when The Hollywood Reporter carried her own statement the next day, which was followed up with an hour-long, tear-filled defiant session with CNN en Español, where she compared her struggles with those of Black people.

Emilia Pérez is entirely made up of award-season bulletpoints and lacks genuine human compassion

Both acts were unwarranted according to industry experts, because the film was already in the thick of another controversy.

Emilia Pérez, irrespective of the Hollywood-wide support (the list includes James Cameron, Michael Mann, Taylor Hackford, Denis Villeneuve, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Shrader, Madonna, Meryl Streep), has been shunned by the very communities it wants to represent. Mexicans, the Latino and the LGBTQ community are critical of the film, calling it an inauthentic misrepresentation — one that has pushed the movement back decades.

The film has a 71 percent score on the review aggregating site RottenTomatoes. However, the audience score (now called the ‘Popcornmeter) paints a different picture altogether, with just 17 percent positive reviews. After watching the film, one cannot, in the slightest, disagree with the audience.

The film is about an internally agonised assistant attorney (Zoe Saldaña, a cinch to win the Best Supporting Actress trophy) who helps a cartel boss (Gascón) shift his business and family, and transition from man to woman.

The storytelling is an exercise in unapologetic, overwrought political correctness that redefines the word hamfisted — especially, when the cartel boss Juan “Manitas” Del Monte becomes Emilia Pérez, returns home to recompense for past sins and reunite with the family (the wife is played by Selena Gomez and her lover is Édgar Ramírez).

Bafflingly, Perez becomes a saintly martyr by the climax, which goes to say that a few good deeds and a little bit of remorse will wipe away a life of crime — one that is never sincerely atoned for in the film itself.

Emilia Pérez is considered a fantasy musical by the director, though it is grounded firmly in reality. The mix is jarring because of the unremitting pompousness the filmmaker employs to tell a story that is entirely made up of award-season bulletpoints, but which lacks genuine human compassion. It doesn’t make your heart swell and rally in favour of the cause it represents.

We see Rita (Saldaña) push through discrimination by her peers, and be bullied by Del Monte, for whom she becomes a facilitator. However, we never see or empathise with her journey of self-discovery (if there is one), even when she becomes independent and successful. Her beliefs (if they do exist) are at the mercy of the point-of-view being delivered here.

At one point, she sings in front of a doctor in TelAviv that “just hearing one’s point-of-view is akin to agreeing with it”; the doctor, meanwhile, is insistent that the patient in question go see a psychiatrist first, and that the Emilia Pérez-identity’s manifestation would be limited to physical surgery, and that it hardly changes the person inside.

If that would have been the entire point of the film, one would have agreed to the bold approach of the narrative. But alas, the film seeks to glorify what is not there in the first place — especially when one sees the story trying to anchor itself to Gascón’s near-baseline performance (how could she get noticed, let alone be nominated, is baffling to comprehend).

The more the film progresses after the 10-minute mark, the more one realises that the film will not get better, and the backlash from the communities and the audience is justified. This is simply a very blatantly provocative enterprise, whose wins at the Oscars this year will tell you of the divide between the industry and the people of the world.

Released by Netflix, Emilia Pérez is rated R and features “bold” themes, communicated via songs (not all of them as bad as people make them out to be), that are surface-deep

Published in Dawn, ICON, February 16th, 2025