By Seth Lukas Hynes
Emilia Pérez
Starring Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez
Rated MA15+
2.75/5
Emilia Pérez is a dull, flat musical that has garnered inexplicable awards acclaim.
In Mexico, cartel boss Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists the help of a lawyer named Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help her undergo gender-affirming surgery and gain a new life.
The pacing is slow and slack, drifting along until an abrupt and implausibly tragic conclusion, and Rita is just a middleman despite being the primary focus.
Scenes of Emilia with her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) are too fleeting for their tense reconnection later on to carry much impact, Epifania (Adriana Paz) is introduced in the third act and contributes almost nothing to the plot, and the cartel crimes Emilia committed pre-transition, which confirm her as an unrelatable monster, are established halfway through the two-hour-plus film.
Emilia Pérez isn’t that bad on the surface – Saldaña and Gascón deliver compelling performances, and there are some poignant, touching moments – but Mexican and trans viewers found the film simplistic and insulting.
French writer-director Jacques Audiard even admitted to doing almost no research, and described Spanish as the language ‘of underdeveloped nations, the poor and migrants.’
Emilia Pérez somehow won Best Picture, Musical/Comedy at the Golden Globes, but I’d say it’s not even the best musical of 2024: that would be the bright, fun and well-staged Wicked, and even the rough, sordid Joker: Folie a Deux has better music. Emilia Pérez’s musical numbers often feature breathy half-singing, indistinct melody and static staging (and that “from penis to vagina” song has been deservedly mocked to hell and back).
Available to stream on Netflix, Emilia Pérez is unsatisfying and poorly-structured as a musical and drama, and at the risk of jinxing it, I will be so disappointed if this wins Best Picture at the Oscars.
