Nominated for 13 Academy Awards, the French-made, Netflix-distributed Mexican trans-narco musical “Emilia Perez” made history Thursday morning.
The film is the most nominated non-English language film in history, the third Spanish-language film to win Best Picture, and the most nominated film about Latinos ever to win an Academy Award. It surpassed the original “West Side Story.”
Carla Sofia Gascón, who plays the titular macho drug lord turned vivacious woman, is the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an acting Oscar. Zoe Saldaña, nominated for Best Supporting Actress, has already won a Golden Globe and a Cannes Acting Award for her performance as Emilia’s resourceful lawyer, Rita Mora Castro, and is an embarrassingly underrated actress. This was the first major award for the actor. Jacques Audiard was also nominated for Best Director.
This praise comes despite the controversy swirling around “Emilia Perez” as if it were a musical number.
Mexican intellectuals have accused the film of reducing the country’s horrific drug war (which has killed nearly half a million people and left more than 100,000 missing this century alone) into a song-and-dance farce. There is. GLAAD described it as a “deeply regressive portrayal of trans women.”
Mexican superstar cartoonist Eugenio Derbez mocked the accent of Mexican-American Selena Gomez, who plays Emilia’s wife, as “indefensible” on a podcast, and later apologized. Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto told Deadline that he felt the film was “totally inauthentic” because there weren’t enough Mexicans in front of or behind the camera.
The uproar was so great that Audiard told CNN Spanish last week that he was “sorry” if viewers found his film “shocking.”
I originally had no plans to watch “Emilia Perez” because the movies and TV shows about Mexican cartels never end. For better or worse, the buzz finally made me curious enough to stream the movie. As someone who has followed the portrayal of Mexicans in film since my days as a film studies major at Chapman University, I felt compelled to say this. The Oscar attention will make the film one of the most prominent films depicting the situation in Mexico in recent years.
Prieto and Derbez’s points are fresa (pretentious), but I understand them. Accents are all over the place, and Mexican Spanish isn’t always accurate (for example, the proper term for a Mexican prison is penitenciaria, not carcel). Audiard reduces Mexico City, one of the world’s largest cities, to a plethora of interior decorations and taco stands. This is not surprising since he shot the film primarily on soundstages in France.
He also talked about his personal decision to transition into a segment on the now-defunct, great TV show “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which featured a scene in which a bandaged patient yells “vaginoplasty!” I can see why GLAAD is so upset about the changes made by the French coach. and “penoplasty!”
The dialogue isn’t particularly memorable, the English subtitles are wildly off, the songs are unforgettable (though two of them were nominated for Oscars), and the heterosexuality of the few characters who appear Mexican men are — stop me if you’ve ever heard this — corrupt, oversexed or ultra-violent. I have no problem with non-Mexican directors making films about this country and its people, but at least we can get to the heart of it, right?
What elevates “Emilia Perez” are the strong performances by Saldaña, Gascón, Gomez, and Mexican actress Adriana Paz, who plays Emilia’s lover. I kept watching with the hopes and expectations that this movie would bring something new to the narco genre, as its defenders say.
Zoe Saldaña (left), Selena Gomez and Carla Sofia Gascón in the movie “Emilia Perez”. Filmed during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. Gascón and Saldaña were nominated for the Oscars for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.
(Jason Almond/Los Angeles Times)
The selection of music formats was not at all insulting. The best musicals, both stage and film, use their fantastical presentation to address contemporary events and issues. Think of morality plays about race and class, such as the French Revolution experienced in “Wicked” or “Les Misérables.” One of the most scathing fictional critiques of the American Dream is the song “Remember the Forgotten Man” and its accompanying set piece from Busby Berkeley’s 1933 Gold Diggers. One of the most hilarious ripostes to Nazism is still Mel Brooks’ The Producers.
“Emilia Perez” believes that it is in that transgressive tradition. Instead, it becomes like every other drug movie. Despite Audiard’s claims that his modern opera breaks down stereotypes about Mexicans, the worst of both the film and the character are at the very point when “Emilia Pérez” is supposed to find its core. I fell into one of those operas.
About halfway through the film, Rita and Emilia are enjoying a meal at an outdoor market when a woman hands them a flyer with a photo of her son who disappeared years ago. Emilia admits that she regrets the role she played in killing so many people and plunging Mexico into lasting chaos. Rita urges her boss to do something about it. The two found the bodies of Los Desaparecidos, the disappeared, and founded an organization that would spark a moral revolution.
Audiard treats their efforts as an unprecedented breakthrough for Mexico, even though it is completely inapplicable to Mexico. People have been doing this work for a long time and will continue to do so long after the hype for the movie is over. Risking their lives, they came forward with journalists, something that “Emilia Perez” would not dare to do.
In a Spanish-language interview with CNN, Audiard admitted that he is not interested in portraying Mexico as it really is, saying, “If I have to choose between legend and fact, I prefer writing legends.” He parroted the famous conclusion of “Legend”. John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
The disappearance of real-life anti-drug activists is a shame, and there is nothing but a ridiculous and sacrilegious end to it. Spoiler alert: If you don’t want to know the ending, skip the next paragraph.
The crowd sang how Emilia “worked miracles / Turning lead into gold” and raised her arms like the Virgin Mary as an Oaxacan brass band played a funeral waltz. Unfurled, a statue of Emilia wearing a robe was paraded through the city.
After all, “Emilia Perez” is a wannabe “Mrs. In Doubtfire, humor and genius are replaced with arrogance and guns. No wonder this movie received so many Oscar nominations. Academy members will always want the Mexico of the movie to be a pitiful hellhole in need of saving, a reminder to change its misguided ways. This is a metaphor that dates back to the days of Manifest Destiny.
Poor Mexico. Far from God and so close to Hollywood.
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