Emilia Pérez Is Not a Progressive Message Movie

And it's a better film because of it

I admit, I was surprised when I learned that Emilia Pérez had emerged as a serious contender for Best Picture. To be clear, I enjoyed the film very much, though I did see it in the best possible circumstances: at the New York Film Festival, in great seats at Alice Tully Hall, surrounded by a huge and supportive crowd, and followed by a talkback with director Jacques Audiard, cinematographer Paul Guilaume, multiple key cast members including Karla Sofía Gascón (since nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance) and Zoe Saldaña (since nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance). But I’m not going to second-guess my reaction because of that, because I remember how I felt: I thought it was a wild and fun ride and completely original, and that’s what I appreciated it for. You can read my contemporaneous thoughts on the film here.

But this film is not Best Picture material. For one thing, it’s just too weird. The main character, initially named Manitas, is the murderous head of a Mexican drug cartel who hires a lawyer, Rita, (Saldaña) to help him secretly get vaginoplasty and other surgeries, fake his death, and reemerge with a new female identity: Emilia Pérez. Missing the children she fathered, she reenters their lives (and the life of their long-suffering mother) as a mysterious and munificent aunt (whose munificence has lots of strings attached). She also undertakes to redeem her past life as a murderous drug dealer by starting a foundation to recover the thousands of bodies of the murdered, allowing their families to achieve some kind of peace. The world remains as thoroughly corrupt as it was when she was the head of a cartel, and she readily works with this system, not against it, something Rita periodically recognizes. But she can’t shed her past personality as easily as she changed her identity. Jealousy and controlling behavior lead to operatic (or, better, telenovela-esque) drama and ultimately to multiple deaths, leaving Emilia Pérez’s children orphaned, and in the care of Rita, who made all of this possible.

And it’s a musical. Does this sound like Oscar-bait to you? To me, it sounds more like Leos Carax’s wacky puppet-led musical, Annette, or like Beau Is Afraid, Ari Aster’s insane fever dream, or, to pick a highly idiosyncratic film from this year, like the surreal and bizarre Megalopolis. I greatly enjoyed all of those films, but they were neither commercial nor critical successes. John Waters dubbed Emilia Pérez “The Rocky Cartel Horror Picture Show,” and that’s about right. It belongs on his top ten of the year. It feels weird that it’s on the Academy’s.

I suspect that one reason it’s there is that voters wanted to make history: to put a trans story and a trans actress up for top honors. Instead, the film is getting hit from both sides: from normies who think the film is too bizarre (and some of whom think the mere fact that it is telling a trans story is part of what makes it too bizarre), and from progressives who have belatedly figured out that this is in no way a progressive message movie, and that Emilia Pérez the character is not someone whom any movement would want as their poster child. But the latter is precisely what makes the film valuable: because it bucks the tendency, in both Hollywood and indie cinema, to demand that a character like this be a poster child, that, as if she were one of Cinderella’s wicked step-sisters, she cut off her heel to make the glass shoe fit, however bloody the consequences for the story. In regard to the crossfire it is taking, the film resembles The Apprentice, another film that has taken flack from both sides for making its main character (one Donald Trump) a fascinating (and often appalling) human being rather than an emblem of good or evil.

And I think, though I don’t know Audiard’s intent, that this fact about Emilia Pérez the character is central to what Emilia Pérez the movie is all about. The key fact about Pérez as a character is not her transformation but her continuity of character: she is in many ways the same person after her surgery and new identity that she was when she was the head of the cartel. She is, for one thing, still enmeshed in the pervasive corruption of her world. Consider the Oscar-nominated song above, “El Mal,” which Rita sings at a banquet fundraiser for Pérez’s charity. Pérez thinks she’s redeeming her past life, and Rita is helping her do it, but in this song Rita gives voice to her bitter awareness that this isn’t really any kind of redemption. The people giving money to the charity are, like Pérez herself, guilty of murder, and owe their wealth to that guilt. Giving to this charity is a way of laundering their pasts and allowing them to keep their power and position untouched. It’s all narcissistic sociopathy.

Does that mean that the film is saying “trans people are sociopathic narcissists?” On the contrary—that’s precisely why the song embraces the whole world in which Pérez swims, as well as why at the very beginning of the film we’re introduced to Rita as she’s defending another narcissistic sociopath who isn’t trans from a charge of murdering his wife—a charge that he’s guilty of. In the world of the movie (at least as Rita experiences it, and she’s functionally the audience’s guide), the system allows narcissistic sociopaths to get away with murder, at least if they are wealthy, powerful and successful. That’s exactly the service that Rita has done for Emilia Pérez: help her get away with murder.

There’s a crucial scene (and song), when Rita approaches an Israeli doctor, Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), about performing the surgery. Wasserman sings about how he can heal the body but not the soul, that if the drug lord, Manitas, wants to be a better woman, the surgery won’t accomplish anything, and if he wants to be a better man it won’t accomplish anything either, at least not on the “better” part. Rita sings, in response, that being embodied as a man while deeply knowing himself to be a woman is what drove him to become the horrible person he is, that a change in the body is necessary to effect a change in the soul.

Since Wasserman goes through with the surgery after interviewing Manitas, it’s reasonable to assume that Rita won that argument. But it’s a great credit to the film that, by the end, you feel that both of them were right. Pérez clearly wanted to become a better person, and it’s plausible that the surgery opened up possibilities for her that weren’t there before. But it’s also clear that in many ways she didn’t change, that she remained controlling, narcissistic, megalomaniacal and potentially murderous. Changing the body may or may not be necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. And a secret rebirth into a new identity, while retaining all the ill-gotten gains of Manitas’s life, was no way for Pérez to change her soul—as she herself comes to realize (that’s why she feels compelled to reenter her children’s lives).

Why Pérez was this way in the first place, meanwhile, is something we can’t ever truly know. We can, as Rita does in the song, attribute Manitas’s cruelty to a survival strategy for a cruel world coupled with the inner stress of living a lie. But even if that’s true, and there wasn’t something else about Manitas that made him a “bad seed,” that cruelty was real, and had to be reckoned with. As I watched and later thought about the film, I kept thinking about The Sopranos and the way in which that series teases us for six seasons with the possibility that therapy will change Tony in some fundamental way, when David Chase knew all along that all it could do was open the door to Tony choosing to change in a more fundamental way, a choice he was never going to make. I also kept thinking of Susan Faludi’s book, In the Darkroom, about her father who transitioned late in life, about the ways in which that transition illuminated her father for her, and also the way in which she saw the abusive man she grew up with still clearly present in this person who said she had always been a woman, and also the impossibility she felt of ever disentangling her father’s gender identity from other facts—like the legacy of the Holocaust of the Jews of Hungary—in trying to “explain” who her father was. It’s quite a big bite for a musical to try to chew on!

I don’t want to suggest that Emilia Pérez is something that it isn’t. It’s not a serious drama; it’s a musical with the heart of a soap opera; it’s fundamentally about big emotions and lurid plot twists. And it has plenty of problems as a movie. The music isn’t nearly as memorable as it should be, for one thing. Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) is severely underdeveloped as a character, for another. And there are a variety of plot holes; why, for example, does Rita seek out Wasserman in the first place when we’ve just seen in a song how easy it would be for Manitas to get surgery done, no questions asked, in Thailand?

But I give it credit for the size of the bite it took. Meanwhile, if what you want is a musical about someone who knows she is different her whole life (and is hated for it), becomes a powerful villain, uses her power to change society, and fakes her own death so she can live happily ever after, you’ll just have to wait for Wicked: For Good later this year.