Emilia Pérez, Globes and EFAs Favorite
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One of the most divisive films to premiere in Cannes this year dominated the European Film Awards over the weekend and now leads the nominations for the Golden Globes with ten. As Scott Tobias describes it at the Reveal, Emilia Pérez is “an audacious genre hybrid that feels like Douglas Sirk by way of Pedro Almodóvar while simultaneously cross-pollinating cartel violence and telenovela plotting with musical numbers that range from speak-singing simplicity to full-on Busby Berkeley extravaganzas.” On Saturday, Emilia Pérez won EFAs for Best Film, Director (Jacques Audiard), Screenplay (Audiard), Actress (Karla Sofía Gascón), and Editing (Juliette Welfling), and it’s a strong contender for the Globe for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.
Drug lord Manitas (Gascón) makes Mexico City lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña) an offer she doesn’t dare refuse. Rita is to travel the globe in search of a physician who can perform the gender-affirming surgery that will allow Manitas to stage a fake death and reemerge as Emilia Pérez. Four years later, Emilia hires Rita again, this time to reunite Emilia with the late Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their children—*and* cofound a nonprofit to aide the families of cartel victims.
“Never one to ignore how rich the crime genre can be in girding his tales of pain and release (A Prophet, Dheepan), the writer-director has taken his biggest swing yet,” writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. Audiard has “made one of his most satisfying movie movies to date by centering the experiences of three (and eventually four) fierce women, rather than his usual brooding men.”
Emilia Pérez “tells a story about the infinite challenges of self-actualization, and it seems to revel in its contradictions, mixing crassness with tenderness, pastiche with originality, silliness with sincerity,” writes the Atlantic’s Shirley Li. “It’s emotionally manipulative. It’s visually over-the-top. It’s a mess, in other words—a spectacular, operatic one . . . I suspect that the film may not hold up well over time, what with its ludicrous lyrics and disjointed tone, but its energetic flair and unabashed audacity make it undeniably exciting to take in.”
“It’s a fine line between well-intentioned empathy and shameless exploitation, and Audiard never manages to find the right side of it,” writes Adam Nayman in the Toronto Star. “He’s also unable—or maybe just unwilling—to truly interrogate the ethical paradox at the heart of the story: the balance between humanism and hypocrisy in Emilia’s reinvention as a self-styled social justice warrior. Even when the film moves toward ambivalence, it backs off in favor of sentimentality.”
Audiard “has created Emilia to startle and divert,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “but it’s Gascón’s performance that centers and grounds the story, and it’s the actress who finally gives the movie real stakes. She is its heart and soul both.” But for Abele, “the real knockout is Saldaña,” while Sean Burns at WBUR argues that the “saving grace is Gomez, who hurls herself into the material’s trashy, telenovela twists with an iconic bleach job and a diva’s sly self-awareness. I wished I was watching whatever movie she seemed to think she was in.”
At Reverse Shot, Caden Mark Gardner, coauthor with Willow Catelyn Maclay of Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, writes that “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 Pérez, in story and framing device, feels out of time, often too distanced to really engage with its eponymous trans protagonist. Its plot . . . sounds offensive in outline, but even this wild concept can apparently be flattened into an ugly-looking, scattershot bore. To get offended by Emilia Pérez would suggest it rose to the occasion to shock and make me feel something. All I felt was every second of its 132 minutes.”
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