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Why do awards shows love this woeful, woke musical?

Emilia Pérez, a musical about a Mexican drug lord’s gender transition, has captivated the Hollywood elite.

Lauren Smith

Topics Culture Identity Politics

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Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (2024) took most people by surprise when it won Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) at the Golden Globes this month – primarily because no one seemed to know that it existed. Its win felt especially implausible, given that it was up against Wicked, a critically acclaimed, box-office smash, based on one of Broadway’s longest-running musicals. But Emilia Pérez has a secret weapon that seems to have turned the brains of critics and awards-givers into mush: it is all about trans.

Emilia Pérez tells the story of Rita, an overworked and underappreciated lawyer in Mexico, who is enlisted by Manitas, a cartel leader, to help him fake his own death and then transition into a woman. Rita arranges for him to have every possible gender-reassignment surgery, and later aids Manitas (now Emilia) to set up an NGO that locates the bodies of cartel victims and notifies their families.

Emilia Pérez is not a good movie. Aside from the fact that it is unsubtle, unbelievable and downright boring, its pandering to identity politics is unbearable. Not only does Emilia’s gender transition magically transform him from man to woman, but also from ruthless drug lord to charitable community leader. Apparently, having a sex change also means wiping away all responsibility for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It feels like Audiard wants us to cheer ‘You go, girl!’ at whatever Emilia does – including when he attacks his wife (who believes her husband is dead and that Emilia is a female relative) for wanting to remarry and move away with their kids. All sins are forgiven by the fact that Emilia identifies as trans.

Emilia Pérez is an even worse musical. In fact, it barely feels like a musical at all. The characters seem almost embarrassed whenever they have to start singing – as they probably should be, given the quality of the songs. Many people will have learnt of this movie’s existence through viral clips of one number in particular, called ‘La Vaginoplastia’ (‘Vaginoplasty’), in which Rita goes to Thailand to learn from a surgeon what procedures Manitas will need. It includes lyrics such as:

‘Hello, very nice to meet you
I’d like to know about sex-change operation
I see, I see, I see
Man to woman or woman to man?
Man to woman
From penis to vagina.’

This, apparently, was worthy of a Golden Globe. That puts Emilia Pérez in the same pantheon of musicals as West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965) and Les Misérables (2012). Really?

It could not be clearer that Emilia Pérez is being feted by the Hollywood elite because of its woke credentials, rather than because of its quality. As well as the Golden Globe wins, it has also managed to pick up 11 Bafta nominations, including for Best Film and Best Leading Actress for Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, even though he is a man. It’s even tipped for an Oscar nomination, too.

As with so much of the woke slop that is served up by Hollywood these days, there is a stark divide between what critics and award-givers think, compared with general audiences. On review-aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Emilia Pérez received a score of 76 per cent from the critics, and an audience score of just 42 per cent.

Ironically, although the taste-makers are swooning over the LGBT themes in Emilia Pérez, the actual trans lobby is not very keen on it. One trans writer called it ‘the most unique cis nonsense you’ll ever see’. Vox described it as a ‘regressive movie that thinks it’s woke’. GLAAD, the LGBT media-monitoring organisation, denounced the film as a ‘profoundly retrograde portrayal of a transwoman’. In trying to craft the wokest possible portrayal of the trans experience, Audiard ends up offending everyone – not least the audiences who paid money to watch a film they might expect to rival Wicked.

Emilia Pérez seems to be even more hated by Mexican audiences. The film has been widely criticised for playing into stereotypes about Mexico being lawless, corrupt and rife with gang violence. Audiard’s admission that he ‘didn’t study [Mexico] much’ has left him open to accusations of cultural appropriation – usually a grievous sin in the eyes of the identitarians.

Audiard, a French director who does not speak Spanish, has also been mocked by Spanish-speakers online for the awkward and at times nonsensical script. To make matters worse, singer Selena Gomez, who for some reason has a lead role in this film, is barely even able to speak Spanish. One Mexican actor described her performance as ‘indefensible’.

It seems as if the only people who actually enjoyed Emilia Pérez (or, at least, pretended to enjoy it) are the virtue-signalling critics and award-givers. It is a pretentious, shallow and impressively tone-deaf exercise in woke box-ticking. No wonder Hollywood loves it.

Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.

Picture from: YouTube.

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