When hearing about a thriller movie about a transgender ex-drug lord in Mexico, many people flocked to the idea. It’s interesting, it sounds insightful. It sounds like it’s morally complex. Chuck in the fact that it’s also a musical? It sells itself! But no, Emilia Perez isn’t insightful, it’s not a good thriller and it’s for sure not a good musical.
Emilia Perez is a 2024 movie directed by esteemed director Jacques Audiard. It features prominent actors like Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez. It sounds promising, no? I mean these are good actors, a good director, I mean it won all those awards and got all those nominations. This must be good, right? No.
The core problem with Emilia Perez is that it packs too much into one movie and none of those themes are solidly researched. The treatment of missing people cases in this movie is horrible, trans people are dragged through the mud, the Spanish isn’t even good! And the music is worse.
For example, Selena Gomez, who is known to be a good actress and singer, acts as Emilia Perez’s wife. Throughout the movie, she is either outshined by another actor or just making a fool of herself. Her whole arc is messy and stupid and very very pointless, especially by the end. But it’s her solo song, oh, her solo song that is just the cherry on top of this garbage. I don’t know if she just genuinely wasn’t in it for this role or if the writing is that bad. The song is unlistenable, like dragging your nails on a chalkboard.
And let’s not forget one of the biggest appeals of this movie: the fact that there is a trans woman acting in a trans story. Now, it is commendable that they hired a actual trans woman for this role, but it is also the literal bare minimum. And it is cool that Karla Sofia Gascon (the actress of Emilia Perez) had the guts to also act as Emilia’s pre-transition self. However, much of the issues with the trans storyline aren’t her fault.
It appears that Jacques Audiard had no trans people in the writing room of this film. We need bad trans people, or morally grey trans people; we don’t necessarily need the trans community to always be angels. But when your whole storyline is surrounding a trans woman and you make her an ex-drug lord who abuses her wife and transitions as a means to escape her drug lord job, it’s just riddled with issues.
Let it also be known that this movie is based off a chapter of a book where the drug lord character transitions not because he is trans, but rather, just to escape being a drug lord. Not only would that have been so much more interesting, it would be so much less transphobic. The film uses stereotypes about transitioning, framing Emilia transness to be connected to her wrongdoing and more.
Genuinely, this is some cis-straight trans fever dream that they wrote without ever even speaking to a trans person.
And on top of this, as if the movie wasn’t bad already, tweets have resurfaced of Karla Sofia Gascon where she is being incredibly racist, which makes it hard to take her seriously.
But hey, at least Zoe Saldana was pretty solid at her role.
If you want a good movie, watch Jeanne Sacrebleu, a Mexican trans-made parody movie with much better music and really bad French. It’s only 30 minutes and worth a watch over whatever this trash was.
