Despite losing out on the Palme D’or to Anora (more on that here), Emilia Pérez made a big splash at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Not only was it the new film from former Palme D’or winning director Jacques Audiard but it also split the Best Actress prize between its four leads, which made it the first time any trans actor has won an acting prize at Cannes. That’s history made, that’s cool, we like this. So with all the buzz building, Netflix buy the film, create a hype machine strong enough to go all the way through awards season and make people ask that crucial question: what is Emilia Pérez? Um, it’s… Well, it’s complicated.

Emilia Pérez is a crime drama that travels from Mexico City to Tel Aviv about a cartel leader who wishes to fake his own death and change his identity. That identity is a transition from male to female. The film is also a musical. So, that’s a lot to take in upfront. This crime boss, Juan, recruits hot shot lawyer Rita to find a surgeon to perform the transition, fake Juan’s death and protect Juan’s family until she returns as Emilia. That’s a pretty intense plot summary for a film. One would argue that it would be three times as intense a summary if it was only the plot summary for the first third of a film, which is exactly the situation in which Emilia Pérez finds itself. The transition is only part of the battle, as Emilia is now living true to herself but not to her family. It all swirls around in an exaggerated version of the mistaken communication trope that goes back as far as Romeo and Juliet, in which Emilia hides her identity from her family and could resolve literally everything by telling any single one of them the truth. As I said, a trope as old as time, but one that nearly drove me to frustration here, especially as relationships become fractured. There’s a lot going on is what I’m trying to say. Often, I like that in a film, give me something to chew on. Here though, I feel less like I’ve been given a lot to chew on and more like I’ve been presented with a big bottle of slop to chug.

I’m not sure why the Cannes jury felt the need to split the [Best Actress] prize as they did.

Where the slop dissipates is the performances, which are universally solid. All the actors are being asked to act, dance and sing at a moments notice and no one seemed like “the one who can’t dance” or “the one whose acting is a little funny.” Arguably, it is Zoe Saldana who leads the film (the fact that she’s being campaigned as a supporting actor is only an indication of awards season politics and not her quality) playing Rita, a talented but underappreciated lawyer who is kidnapped and asked by a local drug lord for help, on the condition that accepting means being stinking rich and declining means death. It’s a tricky line to ride but Saldana manages to make it believable, while also singing and dancing with vigour. Selena Gomez plays Jessi, wife of the drug lord about to fake their own death. I think she’s okay? Considering that she has been singing and acting her whole life, you’d expect her to be a bit more of an event than she is, but at no point do you question this character. I suppose I should also mention Adriana Paz, one of the four who shared that Best Actress win at Cannes. She’s solid, an actress I’ve not seen before who turns in compelling work in a small handful of scenes. To be honest, my only qualm is that it’s a pretty small role, so I’m not sure why the Cannes jury felt the need to split the prize as they did.

To be completely honest, I don’t know why they split the prize seeing as Karla Sofia Gascon is very clearly the best performance in the film. She plays the titular character and it is her journey we follow, as she gets to finally exist in her own body but is forced to reckon with the bad decisions that litter her past. When we first meet Gascon’s character, she is pre-transition and gets to play a sort of drag king version of cartel kingpin Manitas, in a move that works far more than it has any right to. Crucially, most of the film from here on is with Gascon’s character when she identifies as Emilia, which works because, as a trans-woman herself, Gascon is able to imbue pathos into the role beyond what is on the page. As we reckon with a character whose past decisions, whether regarding crime or family, are questionable, she grounds us. I’m going to be pretty critical in a moment of how the film treats Emilia, but without Gascon that criticism could become evisceration. This is a big calling card moment for her and I hope she gets plenty of exciting and more joyful roles in the future from this.

If I can dole out one last bit of praise on the film, I think it has an energy that is admirable and easily propels it through its two hour runtime. Though many of the musical numbers are grounded in reality, they have a physicality, embodied by the actors, that I found myself unable to look away from. These, paired with a few decently catchy songs, will help keep you on your toes through the film. That’s good news because time to be negative, the tone on this is a mess. Musicals can be dark or complicated (All That Jazz is a favourite of mine and revolves entirely around the looming death of its lead) but it is a tough balance. So when the opening number begins and we’re watching someone sing a solo as people are getting kidnapped and knifed, I was immediately on the wrong foot. What are we doing here? A later number about the joys of plastic surgery launches to entirely the other end of the spectrum and is hugely silly in portraying the possibilities of gender affirming care, though maybe I was simply overwhelmed at the amount of times I heard the word “vaginoplasty” sung at me. For a lot of people, this unpredictability will be a virtue, for me it was a nuisance.

There is also the unavoidable question of how the film handles its portrayal of a trans character and explores the setting of Mexico. As ever, it’s worth repeating that I am a cisgender, heterosexual white man who lives in England and so while I can read and listen to people as much as I can, I am always talking about these things from an outsider perspective. I’m not an authority, you should read opinions from people other than me too, who can speak from their experiences as opposed to me speaking from a theoretical perspective (I would recommend as starting points this article about the trans representation and this article about the representation of Mexican culture.) All of this is to say, I think the representation is sloppy. Mexico is portrayed almost exclusively as a land full of murder and drugs in which evil often prevails, which runs counter to the country a lot of people know, plus Europe is presented as a safe land of enlightenment in comparison.

What irked me more was the trans representation. Again, this is all with caveats, as what we have here is far better than some of the representations we’ve seen of the trans community in cinema over the past few decades. Emilia is shown to be at peace in herself once she transitions and once this does occur, despite some doubt from the odd character, she never shows any regret surrounding this decision. Unfortunately, despite this and the casting of an actual trans-woman to play the role, Audiard finds himself succumbing to clichés that reduce the whole thing to pastiche. Scene where Emilia wakes up post surgery and uses a delicate hand mirror to examine the surgery? Check. Scene where Emilia, having now transitioned, uses her scary man voice to frighten a petite woman? Check. The audience are left with the ultimate feeling that to be trans is to suffer? Regrettably, check check and check. Emilia Perez was made outside of America and so it’s important to understand the context of its creation, but in its distribution by Netflix and absorption into awards season noise, it will find itself fitting into familiar narratives. In these stories about minority groups that poise themselves for awards success, the crucial element that leads to their success is suffering. To accept Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, they have to suffer. To understand John Coffey’s heart in The Green Mile, he has to suffer. In Sound of Metal, the journey Ruben goes on through his disability is framed through his suffering. The films I’ve mentioned aren’t bad films, but they do fit into the trope of using tragedy to elicit sympathy, which is directed towards people who may be different sexuality, gender or race than the viewer.

[Audiard] is the wrong pair of hands to create emotional authenticity with this story.

Culturally, we are told we have to work our way through these films of suffering before we can have films of joy. And I’m sick of seeing these people suffer. I want to see black joy, queer joy, disabled joy, plus all the little middle bits in this Venn diagram. Of course, you can find these films off the beaten track. My partner showed me The Watermelon Woman for the first time recently and though this is a film that wants to probe film’s racist history, it is also a joyful film. Characters fall in and out of love with ease, goals are achieved without someone having to be called a slur, we get to see a black lesbian smiling for maybe 80% of the film. I’m realising this is starting to look more like a review of The Watermelon Woman than a review of Emilia Perez but what I’m trying to get at is I want to hear different stories. To go off book again, I Saw The TV Glow is a film that upsets the audience with how it frames a character rejecting their transness, but told through a metaphorical layer that allows uninterested audiences the opportunity to engage with a different part of the story. This is still a story in which a trans person suffers, but it’s a different kind of suffering and crucially, a kind expressed by a writer and director who is trans. Stories like Emilia Perez aren’t stories that have no worth, but they are stories who should be told by other people. Jacques Audiard is a cisgender white man in his seventies and though he isn’t incapable of telling this story, he is the wrong pair of hands to create emotional authenticity with this story.

Ultimately, your patience with Emilia Perez will depend on how much you cared about those last two paragraphs. If you don’t really know what I was on about, then you will be dazzled and probably gripped by this. If you feel as I do about the complicated politics of trans representation, this may be one that will puzzle you. Regardless, those who adore and detest the film alike can agree that this is a film unlike almost any other. You may never see something like this again and for many, that will be good news. For me, I found myself underwhelmed and overstimulated, newly trapped in a world full of discourse yet to come. With it launching on Netflix today though, the choice to dive in will be yours the next time you hit your sofa.