Emilia Pérez has broken my brain

Ryan Murphy presents Baz Lurhmann's Mrs. Doubtfire.

Ten years ago, the phrase “Netflix original” conferred excitement and newness. You were going to get something you hadn’t seen before, but that also felt like it was made for you, with actors you had always liked. (Ah, the halcyon days when the algorithm was invisible.) Shows like House of Cards and Stranger Things dominated the cultural narrative because people were loving them, and loving the thrill of a new discovery. Now, the phrase “Netflix original” has an implied “(derogatory)” attached to it. There are still beloved shows that break through, like Bridgerton and Squid Game, but the default association is now an overwhelming mid-ness. Now “Netflix original” means a feature-length brand extension from Dwayne Johnson and/or Ryan Reynolds, brought to you by Teremana Tequila and Aviation Gin but still somehow costing a quarter of a billion dollars and looking like the inside of a dryer lint trap.

Enter Emilia Pérez. Amidst a sludgy sea of risk-averse mediocrity, especially on Netflix, this movie is a huge swing. It’s loud, it’s defiant, it’s strange. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve watched before. And just about none of it works. In fact, I viscerally loathe it. But I wouldn’t call it a failure, like I would just about everything Dwayne has done since his failure of a Fast & Furious spinoff. I would call it a fiasco.

Elizabethtown, a movie I hated so much I couldn’t get past the first 10 minutes because I was on the verge of rage vomiting, helpfully outlined the difference between a failure and a fiasco. “A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fiasco…a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others, that makes other people feel more alive. Because it didn’t happen to them.”¹ Fiascos require an unhealthy mix of ambition, confidence, and delusion, to create something unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Fiascos sink into your soul and weigh you down, because they won’t leave you. And this is a fiasco that I’ve been spinning out about ever since

Clara

texted me about it on her way out of the theatre.

Spoilers for Emilia Pérez ensue. “To listen is to accept.”

One might assume that this movie was never going to work, but I don’t know that that’s true. The premise—a Mexican drug kingpin (Karla Sofia Gascón) seeks gender confirmation surgery, then years later tries to return to her wife and children while also starting a non-profit to identify the desaparecidas that she had murdered while she was a drug kingpin—is lurid, but not disqualifyingly so. It’s also needlessly complicated, since this kingpin hires downtrodden lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana) to do things like “research the surgeries I need” and “help me fake my death,” which is not what you hire a lawyer for. But director Jacques Audiard took his inspiration from opera, so the emotions are massive, the logic is tortured, and the stakes are stratospheric. Someone could make a good, engaging movie with all of this. What is disqualifying, and what makes it a fiasco, is just about every aspect of the execution.

First, Audiard is proudly unfamiliar with Spanish as a language. He said that not speaking Spanish gave him “the freedom to just focus on the musicality of the language itself”, which also explains why he thought Selena Gomez’s Spanish was good enough! (Just make her character a non-Spanish speaker! Since apparently you need Selena Gomez so badly for this specific movie!)

Audiard’s ignorance also presumably gave him the “freedom” to film the majority of a movie set in Mexico on a soundstage in France; and the freedom to cast Latina actresses to play characters who were originally written as native Mexicans, despite none of them being from Mexico. His ignorance doesn’t just stop at Spanish as a language, either; Audiard is rather defiantly unfamiliar with the language of movie musicals. And boy, does it show. Take, for example, the song “La Vaginoplastia.”

This number has gotten the most attention, and that makes sense. It’s really the only memorable song in the whole movie, for reasons that become obvious about 14 seconds in. And, to be clear: my issue is not with the camp factor. I love camp. My issue is with this all being very terrible.

Here’s what I think they’re trying to do here: Zoe Saldana’s character, Rita, is getting swept up in the thrill of her assignment (finding a doctor who will perform these gender confirmation surgeries). She’s finally in a world where money is no object and everything is available to her. She’s no longer being compelled, as she was in her job as a lawyer to dirtbags; or coerced, as she was when kingpin Manitas had her kidnapped and tossed into the back of a limo to retain her services. At this point, she feels empowered and excited to say yes to things. This is her “Fake Your Way to the Top,” her “Non-Stop,” her “Popular.”

But I had to wrestle that meaning out on my own, because Audiard has no idea how to convey it in a musical number. Musicals are highly accessible texts. They don’t just have dialogue, acting, camerawork, and editing at their disposal. They’ve got music and choreography as well, to layer and reinforce meaning. But in this song, the tools aren’t all working together. The blocking and editing feels random and unmotivated—why cut away from a close-up in the middle of a note? Why obscure the lead’s face behind random extras passing in front of the camera? Why make Rita’s reaction to Adam’s apple reduction surgery, of all the ones listed, the ecstatic climax of the song? Why make the song sound SO bad? The overwhelm here doesn’t feel giddy, just exasperating.

A quick glimpse of my soul during what was only the fourth musical number.

Unfortunately, “exasperating” is the most positive I felt for the entire movie-watching experience. After Rita successfully fakes Manitas’s death and moves the widow Jessi with her children to Switzerland, Emilia Pérez is officially born. (And I really hate writing about a trans person this way, so please believe me when I say that this is how the movie, and Emilia herself, talks about her path.) A few years later, Emilia resurfaces in Rita’s newly happy life determined to reconnect with her children. She compels Rita yet again—through threat of murder, yet again—to bring Jessi and the kids back to Mexico to live with Emilia, who will pretend to be Manitas’s long-lost cousin. Indeed, she is literally pulling a Mrs. Doubtfire.

She also founds her non-profit dedicated to finding and identifying the bodies of the desaparecidas, which I found hilariously neoliberal of her. Emilia pursues this line of work allegedly to give their families closure, but really to assuage her guilt of having so much red on her ledger while insisting that she, Emilia, is innocent. After all, it was Manitas who killed all those people, and Manitas is dead! She even falls in love with Epifania, the widow of one of her—I’m sorry, Manitas’s—victims. Again, opera/soap opera/telenovela logic abounds. And Emilia ascribes all of her murderous villainy to Manitas, which is her folly. But when she relapses into violence against Jessi, her voice drops two octaves, as if she’s relapsing into being Manitas again. And that’s not the character’s choice; that’s the movie’s. It’s profoundly upsetting.

It all ends the way any tragic opera ends: with Emilia, Jessi, and Jessi’s very sexy boyfriend all dying in a car crash, Epifania leading a funeral march in Emilia’s memory, and Rita adopting Emilia’s children. A tragic tale of unmitigated hubris and delusion. A disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco.

Help is on the way, dearie!

A moment for the good: Zoe Saldana is truly giving the performance of her life. I’ve been a fan of her since day one—her debut in Center Stage is one of my favourite “hello, I’m a star” examples—despite her numerous attempts to shake me loose. This isn’t what I would call an effortless performance, but neither was Julia’s in Erin Brockovich, or any of Leonardo DiCaprio’s before he got his Oscar, and so what? There’s nothing wrong with having something to prove.

But any good to be found in this movie is the definition of ‘fruit of the poisonous tree.’ The arrogance behind this production plays very much like contempt for its subjects as well as its medium. They insist on telling a story about Mexico when none of the leads are from Mexico. They insist on being a musical despite the director not being familiar with musicals. They insist on telling a story about a trans woman while relying on harmful and reductive tropes about trans women.

I’m not surprised that Emilia Pérez did so well at Cannes. A jury of French film people rewarding a French man for believing he can make a movie about Mexico on a Parisian soundstage is a little on the nose, but it fits. I am surprised at the volume of Golden Globes support (Emilia Pérez is the second-most nominated movie in Golden Globes history), but not necessarily the support itself. The Globes have long been the most transparently vulnerable to both the star power and the emotional appeal of a movie’s award season narrative, more so than the movie’s legitimate strengths. And I now find myself in a position I really hate being in, where I’m actively rooting against a movie’s success.

Meme by the homie @thefilmmemes

It feels a bit like Green Book, in that it’s a rancid, retrograde movie starring actors I really like making something I find genuinely regressive. But the difference here is that Green Book wasn’t a big swing in any way. Its politics were retrograde, but so were its sensibilities. It played like a “race picture” from the 1960s, a style that most of us had assumed we’d moved on from as a society. Emilia Pérez is doing something different. I said it before, but it really doesn’t look or sound like anything else—again, partly due to originality, partly due to incompetence. It’s awful in a way I’m not used to seeing. And while I kind of understand people being dazzled by the boldness and newness of it all, I worry those people are doing something dangerous. Telling trans people who are vocally hurt by this movie that they should go and make their own movie isn’t doing anything for the culture. Telling people to keep their criticisms to the dinner table isn’t going to get us free. “Not in front of the white folks” never did anything for anybody but the white folks, and I bet you that holds true for the cis folks, too.

1. Cameron Crowe taking time to define a fiasco right at the top of what would be his most notorious, reputation-shattering fiasco was a bold move. Bravo.