The French musical film Emilia Perez has garnered 13 Oscar nominations. Oh, "hoorah" for "woke" Hollywood. Now, let’s be “honest” about this: In the new era of anti-Hispanic racism—disguised within the “crisis” of the “border” and “immigration”—this feels like “political correctness” at its most cynical. Let’s remember that this is a French film, and even a Mexican transplant like Guillermo del Toro has praised the film despite the fact he has never cast a Hispanic actor in any of his American films because, well, he’s “white” and he only works with white actors. Being from Mexico’s “Euro-elite” class, he probably doesn’t know much about the reality of Mexico anyways, or at least is dishonest about it and doesn't want to face it.
It is amusing that all of these Hollywood “insiders” love this movie made by a filmmaker who apparently has never been to Mexico, but is his personal interpretation of, uh, what? Underneath all the “trans” politics, it is an ignorantly racist film that has no understanding of what is going in Mexico, save what the media reports, gender activists, and racist right-wing commentators and politicians tell us what is happening.
Critics—meaning those viewing it from the point of view of the reality on the ground—point out that the “trans” angle in the film is simply a cheap gender political stunt to suggest that only men are killers—and “natural born” at that—and so to instead of suggesting a more logical reason for the Juan/Emilia character to undergo a sex change operation—to escape being arrested by police or killed by his fellow cartel associates—does so rather because in order to live a “normal life,” one must become a woman, because, you know, women are stereotyped too (just the “good” kind).
Rotten Tomatoes shows the vast disconnect between reviewers and viewers:
Reviewers—as well as those in the film industry in this country who tend to be part of an industry that discriminates against Hispanics even in a city that is 50 percent Hispanic—do the usual “positive” response to gender-affirming and stereotyping politics, but forget that the people most likely to see this Spanish-language film in this country will be, well, mostly people who either speak Spanish or of Hispanic heritage.
And guess what? Most of them hate this film, especially in Mexico, where it is just another patronizing, stereotypical and ill-informed portrait of Mexico. Worse, putting it in the context of a “musical” trivializes the real experiences of people in Mexico who must bear the brunt of the effects of American drug culture.
And, yes, if you
are male, this isn’t for “you.” The director, Jacques Audiard, may be male, but
he isn’t “Mexican,” he isn’t one of them,
so he can portray them any way that makes him feel good about himself. He tells himself
he just made a film that shows you that he is “gender sensitive,” but he is
not going to talk about his own country, which has never elected a female as president
(as has the U.S. failed to do on two attempts), yet Mexico’s current president
is female. How backward of them (I mean the U.S. and France).
Hundreds of thousand of people have been killed in Mexico from “infighting”
among drug cartels. But why are they even there? Even into the 1990s, “drug
lords” were just small-time hoods, until most of the main “bosses” in the Colombian
cartels were killed-off during the “War on Drugs,” which only moved the “center” of
the drug trade from Colombia to Mexico because, you know, Americans still want
their illegal drugs.
So, uh, how many actors are we told are actually “Mexican” in this film? One? That make it “authentic”? We are told that no one from Mexico was involved in the production. Sorry, Zoe Saldana, who plays mostly black roles in her films, is not “Mexican,” nor does she even “look” like one, which of course means that in this country, she isn't limited to playing "Hispanic" roles—unlike, say, actors who look the stereotypical "Hispanic" and not like "real Americans"--and yet she is the film’s only really “good” Mexican. Oh, wait, the director knows that people will question her casting, so we learn that the only “good Mexican” is one who isn’t actually one but a transplant from another country.
Meanwhile, “Emilia” is a former cartel “kingpin” named Juan who decides he wants to get out of the racket but can’t because he’s a “man,” and he can’t help being a “man,” especially a Hispanic male and all the baggage that brings with it in the view of most people in this country; of course the only recourse he has is to transform himself into a woman.
On Reddit, a man from Guatemala who has seen the film, admits that he understands the hate “this movie has from the Mexican audience…as many are repelled by the way in which this movie handles such a sensitive topic that has ruined the lives of so many” and that
The almost non-inclusion of Mexican crew bothers me more personally, if you're interested search for the tasteless comments given by EP's casting director on why they didn't go for Mexican talent (they couldn’t “find” any). Rodrigo Prieto (Mexican DOP known for working on Barbie and multiple Scorsese movies) also gave some very insightful commentary on the artificiality of the Mexican reproduction carried by this movie.
Prieto directed an adaptation of Juan Ruflo's novel Pedro Paramo, which was a major influence on the "magic realism" of Latin American writers like
Everything in the movie feels inauthentic and it really bugs me. Especially when the subject matter is so important to us Mexicans. It’s also a very sensitive subject. The whole thing is completely inauthentic. I’m not talking about the musical side of it, which I think is great. That’s a great idea. But why not hire a Mexican production designer, costume designer, or at least some consultants? Yes, they had dialogue coaches but I was offended that such a story was portrayed in a way that felt so inauthentic.
Again, just like in the immigration “debate,” the only voices you don’t hear are the ones who are most affected—although you may eventually hear the “natives” start wondering why they see food and housing construction costs rise even more (yeah, polls show that they approve of “high-skilled” immigration that has nothing to do with the quality of their own lives, which they like to complain about, and are told to blame the wrong people).
Also on Reddit, someone named Jmike noted that UK actors at least try to sound “American,” but in
Emilia Perez, it's like they didn't even bother. Selena Gomez sounds like she's doing a Siri or Alexa impression. Zoe Saldaña's character is supposed to be Mexican, but she speaks with a Dominican accent the whole time. And Karla Sofia Gascón barely speaks, and when she does, it feels forced and unnatural, like she's trying to hide her accent.
And the slang. It's like they took a bunch of Mexican slang words, threw them in a blender, and sprinkled them randomly throughout the script. They use our words, but they use them wrong, in sentences that make absolutely no sense. It's like they think just by throwing in a few "güey" and "chingada" they're capturing the essence of Mexican Spanish. It's like they think we won't notice, or that we won't care. We notice the lack of effort, the lazy stereotypes, the blatant disregard for our language and culture.
It's frustrating because it feels like they're profiting off our culture while ignoring our voices…The movie trivializes serious, real-world issues faced by Mexicans, such as disappearances and narco-violence, by addressing them in a superficial, caricatured way. Additionally, the portrayal of Mexico is stereotypical and reductive—depicting it as nothing more than street markets, deserts, or a sepia-toned backdrop. To make matters worse, the production team claimed the roles were initially intended for Mexicans but suggested they couldn’t find "talent" in Mexico.
Another person of the “well, so what” persuasion suggested that “you can't do anything to help resolve these social issues then just watch the movie and get a popcorn and have some fun. These movies HAVE NO IMPACT on the actual problems in real life.” Maybe not, but they do have an impact on ignorant and uninformed opinions that are “merely” perpetuated and confirmed in films like this. Spanish writer and philosopher Paul Preciado put an intellectual spin on the criticism of the film, noting that (translated from the Spanish by Öykü Sofuoğlu)
While presenting itself as a super-modern film with feats of narrative invention, Emilia Pérez, when one knows the history of trans representation, is a palimpsest of colonial and binary semiotic ruins, as predictable as it is anachronistic. Abiding by the requirements of the hegemonic narrative canon that has been challenged by collectives and by trans and racialized individuals themselves, Emilia Pérez perpetuates a psychopathological vision of gender transition that relies on four tropes: criminalization, ethnographic exoticization, medico-surgical representation of gender transition and execution. No need to give a spoiler alert here.
Audiard’s film is part of a lineage, starting with Hitchcock in Psycho (1960), later followed by Brian De Palma in Dressed to Kill (1980) and Jonathan Demme in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), in which trans woman is portrayed as an assassin, a frustrated psychopath man in pursuit for vengeance. The difference is that Emilia rather seeks redemption: instead of killing to become a woman, Audiard’s killer will become a woman to stop killing. But we never escape the accountability of crime and wrongdoing.
According to this story, which is based on the sexual division of violence, gender transition can only be a path to atonement for guilt through sacrifice: a passage from killer to saint, from masculinity as the operator of death to femininity as the passive receptacle of violence. A polysemous amalgamation laden with racism and transphobia, Latinx exoticism and melodramatic binarism, the figure of Emilia reinforces the colonial and pathologizing narrative not only about gender transition, but also about Mexican culture. The film presents the desire to become trans as the ultimate and most criminal whim of a Mexican drug trafficker, one that must be carried out in secret and can only be paid for with the dirty money from drugs.
Becoming a woman, thus, would consist of transforming the racialized persecutor man into a white-victimized woman. Then, as in all normative narratives about gender transition, Audiard adopts an ethnographic perspective: the trans person is portrayed as inherently foreign and strange, as the Other, who does not speak their language. This process of othering reaches its peak through the relocation of the story to Mexico and the film being shot in Spanish.
To become a woman, the narco-man must change not only sex, but also skin, face, body, and soul – the entire being. Somewhere between a horror film and a “sexploitation-style” comedy like Let Me Die A Woman, once Dr. Frankenstein-Audiard’s cinematic operation is complete, Emilia first appears as a faceless body, entirely covered in white bandages, a hybrid of the Mummy, Christiane in Les Yeux Sans Visage, and Vera in La Piel que Habito. It is to suggest that the reason the drug trafficker wants to become a woman is to whiten himself, in both the sense of washing away his guilt and shedding his identity (literally tearing off his skin) as a racialized Mexican macho.
Set against the backdrop of rap choreography and melodramatic mafia thriller, the film’s message is that trans women are criminal and violent men from the south, who launder dirty money from drug trafficking by acquiring a woman’s body on the capitalist market. Jacques Audiard thus reiterates one of the rhetorical devices of transphobic discourse, according to which a trans woman is a wolf disguised as a sheep’s clothing. Emilia deceives her children, who do not know they are actually speaking to their “father” and deceives the citizens, who see her as a saint involved in finding victims of the cartels, when she is actually a former drug lord. A trans woman is an imposter who deserves the ultimate politic punishment. The wolf (and at the same time the sheep) must be executed.
So the film carries out a ritualistic, politico-visual execution of the trans woman, depicted as a patriarchal fraud, at the hands of patriarchy itself. The film should be viewed in light of racist, anti-immigration policies of the Global North and the institutionalization of transphobia over the last four decades. The fact that Emilia is a Mexican trans woman is not insignificant. Since the Reagan administration, the so-called “war on drugs” has been a political tactic to expand the criminalization and incarceration of racialized and migrant minorities. In the context of imperialist geopolitics, the Mexican body, which is the central object of surveillance and repression of the border that separates the north and the south, holds the place of racial difference within a neocolonial taxonomy.
Thus it is frustrating to a community that has no voice in this society, or is too divided amongst itself to provide even a voice lost in the wilderness, to have to speak "for" them without their permission people like Donald Trump who calls them “criminals,” “rapists,” escapees from mental asylums and what not, and on the other hand those who think they are allowed to do the “speaking” for them, like the director of films like this whose only apparent aim is to trivialize, demonize and to engage in common stereotypes and prejudices.
I’m sure the actresses involved in this film thought it was “radical” in the sort of way as other recent films made by French directors like Poor Things and The Substance, which for me only proves that parts of the French film industry is going down the deep end in absurdity. But why pick on Mexicans? Because you don’t have to feel “self-conscious” about the lies you tell about them.
Update: Here is another review of the film:
Film critic Jack Hamilton in Slate is pointing out that despite the fact it won four Golden Globes and dominated the Oscar nominations, it is “one of the worst movies of the year” and “offensive on multiple levels.” Just because it has a “transgender” character—which Hamilton notes has been called “ham-handed,” “retrograde” and “laughable” by even the LGBTQ community—does not make the film “genre-defying” as Netflix’s attempt to sell the film claims it is, but in fact is just a typical “musical” that isn’t particularly “original” or innovative as it claims to be, just because it was made by a French director whose “vision” of Mexico is entirely his own creation, and if while watching it you find the film
…both ludicrous and potentially wildly offensive, you are on to something. Mexican viewers have excoriated the film’s sensationalist and deeply retrograde depiction of their country as a violence-ridden failed state, as well as Audiard’s seeming disinterest in anything resembling cultural authenticity.
Hamilton goes on
At one point early in the film, Rita sings to a skeptical surgeon, “changing the body changes society; changing society changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society; changing society changes it all,” which feels like the closest the movie comes to a thesis statement. But it’s also a moronic sentiment, and one that carries distinctly reactionary implications. After all, the idea that what individual people choose to do with their bodies redounds to “societies” and “souls” is the driving logic behind nearly every brand of bigotry under the sun.
You can read between the lines what he is saying there; no one is completely “innocent” of employing hypocrisy in “advancing” their “agenda.”
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