A New Leaf
By Caden Mark Gardner
Emilia Perez
Dir. Jacques Audiard, France, Netflix
The history of trans narrative films and documentaries at the Cannes Film Festival is short and unremarkable. The earliest known work is Frank Simon’s documentary The Queen, which played at the famously abbreviated 1968 Cannes. In recent years, there was Lukas Dhont’s Girl, a festival hit that received polarized responses within the trans community—for both casting and the miserabilism imparted on its trans protagonist—once it got released. Less widely recalled is 1987’s Mascara, from Flemish director Patrick Conrad, debuting in the Directors’ Fortnight section (alongside such films as John Sayles’s Matewan and Aki Kaurismaki’s Shadows in Paradise). The film is all but forgotten, but at the time it received attention from the trans community for exemplifying that when trans bodies are presented, or rather “revealed,” to an audience, there is often revulsion, regardless of the filmmaker’s intent. The film features Italian trans actress Eva Robins (best known as the bewitching “Girl on the Beach” in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae), whose character, after revealing her body on-screen to her love interest, Michael Sarrazin’s corrupt police commissioner, is murdered, igniting the narrative. The reaction to her “reveal” was boos from the Cannes audience. Mascara is one of the less remembered films to earn the “booed at Cannes” trademark mainly because the reaction was less reflective of the film’s quality than audience transphobia. Conrad’s intentions may not have been to elicit revulsion; the image of Robins’s corpse is shot like a Romantic painting. Mascara shows a notable interest in a nightlife ecosystem dominated by trans women, but its perspective is mired in TV drama-like procedural. When the trans community got wind of the film’s negative reception, the South African trans magazine Fanfare remarked, “[It] just goes to prove the world isn’t ready for us yet!”
Perhaps one who experienced the rapturous response to Jacques Audiard’s musical Emilia Perez at this year’s Cannes can look back at the Mascara incident and believe progress has been made in terms of trans tolerance and inclusivity. However, as somebody who has devoted a significant amount of critical writing and research to the ways in which culture and politics intersect or clash with trans visibility, I believe that Emilia Perez, in story and framing device, feels out of time, often too distanced to really engage with its eponymous trans protagonist. Its plot, about a Mexican drug lord cutting the line and paying her way to transition, all set to musical numbers, sounds offensive in outline, but even this wild concept can apparently be flattened into an ugly-looking, scattershot bore. To get offended by Emilia Perez would suggest it rose to the occasion to shock and make me feel something. All I felt was every second of its 132 minutes.
Over the decades, there has been no shortage of films treating the very act of a “sex change operation” as outrageous and taboo, but in Emilia Perez it manages to just be stale and inert. The plot follows Mexican lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) as she gets coerced into assisting drug lord Manitas Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) in getting a surgeon so she can finally live as a woman. Trans actress Gascón portrays the male version of the character in golden grills and a beard (and speaks in a growling lower register), but even when presenting the character as masculine, Audiard offers a “reveal” scene where Manistas discloses to Rita (although not to the audience) that she has been experiencing breast growth through a couple of years of HRT. Rita, on a multimillion-dollar retainer to procure information and services that Emilia/Manitas easily could have obtained by visiting a transgender online forum like Susan’s Place, jet-sets across the world to find a surgeon.
One of the film’s first musical numbers, “La vaginoplastia” (you read that right), tries to lean into the camp quality of the plot, but it lacks any real edge or wit. The performance, set in a Bangkok hospital, reminded me of the misbegotten Myra Breckinridge (1970), which starts in a mysterious surgery ward, and which posits, among its many farcical ideas, that Rex Reed can become Raquel Welch. Yet that film, and the Gore Vidal book that inspired it, had an anarchic prankster quality entirely missing in Emilia Perez, which is just insipid. In another echo of Myra Breckinridge, once the protagonist becomes Emilia Perez, she spreads word that Manitas is dead and that she is the mysterious relative seeking to claim what is hers—which for Emilia’s case is the children she had with spouse Jessi (Selena Gomez), who has since taken on a new lover. The schematics that result from these knotty character dynamics are predictably messy but ultimately hollow.
While works like The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Read My Lips, and A Prophet showed Audiard’s gift for kinetic and absorbing genre filmmaking, there has been diminishing returns in his oeuvre since Rust and Bone. His body of work has gotten increasingly whimsical and pedantic; here he substitutes kitchen-sink realism for an aesthetic that feels like a pre-distressed t-shirt (typified by Saldaña’s absurd raccoon-eyes makeup when portraying an unhappy counselor-at-law early in the film). Audiard is here way out of his comfort zone, and he fails in his effort to do too much, leaving him to skim the surface of his film’s many themes and hooks. Emilia Perez is not only fueled by musical numbers that range from gaudy music video aesthetic to Busby Berkeley, it also raises questions of national identity, crime, class, gender identity, justice, and family, centering a lead character trying to make living amends for her life of crime.
Though Audiard had conceived Emilia Perez as an opera (based on Boris Razon’s novel Écoute), one wonders if the narrative would be more effective without the music. The songs by Clément Ducol and Camille, mostly sung in a conversational patter, aren’t even as memorable as the numbers from the films of fellow French director Christophe Honoré (Love Songs and Beloved). (For a trans musical about the difficulties of life and love, just watch Rosa von Praunheim’s City of Lost Souls.) Strip away the music from Emilia Perez and the viewer is left with a rather banal story, during which we are repeatedly told Emilia feels guilty for her direct role and complicity in drug-related murders and that she has rehabilitated herself into being a respected leader of a nonprofit that will bring closure to victims of cartel violence. While Gascón, a working telenovela actress, proves disciplined in maneuvering through the material with a broad but credible portrayal, Audiard does not grant her the space for any genuine character evolution. This is largely because the film’s perspective is so wedded to Saldaña’s Rita, whose relationship to Emilia comes across as too transactional to be anything deeper, even as the film spans years of them being in each other’s orbit.
Audiard may have had the best intentions, as he has worked with trans performers before (including Rebecca Root in The Sisters Brothers), but there is not enough interiority given to his trans lead to provide any emotional stakes as the character winds her way to inevitable martyrdom. There is rarely any palpable sense of anxiety as Emilia looks over her shoulder, not only for the crime world’s potential retribution against her but also the systemic transphobia and the risk of violence tied to being a trans person who can be outed against their will. The closest the viewers get to Emilia’s inability to keep up appearances is when her children are involved—these rare moments are humanizing, showing that on some level she is acting out of some level of selfishness and pride.
Perhaps I ultimately cannot muster a strong reaction one way or another to Emilia Perez because I have become numb to the idea of liberal pablum as respite for the dreadful realities that await trans people like me in the United States. What has actually shocked me has been seeing the Vice President-elect openly gloat about his transphobia on podcasts and more than $200 million dollars in anti-trans ads being poured into the recent U.S. election, in which Mexicans and trans people became interchangeable existential threats to societal order by Trump supporters. It’s not that I thought significant progress had been made or that “the world was ready for us,” but witnessing a certain strain of transphobic malice that had been fomented by online far-right internet trolls being transferred to the highest office in the world, is a surreal development, one that American society needs to reckon with. With its storytelling stumbles and lackluster music, Emilia Perez was never going to be a film that I could embrace, but its arrival in this moment in history feels like botched punchline of a cosmic joke.