How Emilia Pérez offended just about everyone

Karla Sofía Gascón, the trans ‘star’ of award-winning musical Emilia Pérez, currently finds himself in a spot of bother. In a series of unearthed tweets largely posted between 2020 and 2021, Gascón expressed some very un-Hollywood political views. He criticised Muslim immigration into his native Spain, called the late George Floyd a ‘drug-addict swindler’ and said, effectively, that the 2021 Oscars were too woke (‘[I] didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival [or] a Black Lives Matter demonstration… an ugly, ugly gala’).

As a result of these politically incorrect outbursts, the right-on denizens of the movie industry have turned on Gascón. The ‘trailblazing’ actor is now facing calls to withdraw from his nomination for Best Actress in next month’s Oscars – which given that he is a man, he should really never have been nominated for in the first place. Netflix, which produced Emilia Pérez, has tried to remove him from the film’s promotional material – which is pretty difficult, considering that Gascón plays the titular character.

Yet before this scandal broke, Gascón was guilty of something far more insulting than a set of off-colour tweets. That crime was, of course, Emilia Pérez itself.

Critics have fawned over this Netflix musical, and it has been nominated for 13 Oscars. Yet many members of the public are rather less impressed.

Emilia Pérez is about the gender transition of Gascón’s character – a Mexican drug cartel boss called Manitas del Monte, who becomes Emilia Pérez. It uses the gory reality of male violence and drug cartels in Mexico as background decoration. In doing so, it indulges in just about every negative stereotype of Mexico and Latin America going.

Unsurprisingly, Emilia Pérez hasn’t gone down so well in the region it is set in. Made by a French director and shot mostly in France with a predominantly US cast, it only has one Mexican actor (in a minor role). When asked why it did not feature Mexican actors, the casting director said she searched all over Latin America looking for ‘really authentic’ actors. But according to the casting director, they weren’t up to the task. When French director Jacques Audiard was asked how much research he did on Mexico before taking the film on, he admitted: ‘I didn’t study much. What I had to understand, I knew.’ Audiard is clearly as arrogant as he is delusional.

Emilia Pérez has also trivialised drug cartels’ forced disappearances of people, which is a deeply painful subject for far too many families in the region. The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances estimates that there are around 110,000 people who are missing just in Mexico alone. Yet Emilia Pérez features jailed cartel members and family members of disappeared people singing in unison about redemption and justice. As some have pointed out on social media, this is akin to making a musical about 9/11 in which al-Qaeda terrorists and those who died in the Twin Towers sing a song together about love and forgiveness.

Other than its stereotype-laden portrayal of Mexico and flippant treatment of the violent drug wars, Emilia Pérez is simply a terrible film. Gascón plays a cartel boss who is responsible for every horrible crime imaginable. Yet he is seemingly redeemed overnight by deciding his gender identity doesn’t correspond with his sex. From that point on, he randomly decides to become a philanthropist and help victims of Mexico’s drug war.

Emilia Pérez is an abomination from top to bottom. It features terrible music, a nonsensical lead character and butchers the Spanish language to within an inch of its life. Unsurprisingly, the movie has an audience score of 18 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and flopped at the box office.

This movie’s only saving grace is Zoe Saldaña’s Rita Mora Castro. Rita is an exhausted lawyer, from a working-class background, dealing with cases about male violence against women. It is a miserable, thankless job where good deeds go unnoticed and corruption is rampant. She decides to join the dark side and become Emilia Pérez’s right-hand woman, hoping that selling her soul might lead to wealth and a better life.

Saldaña lends Rita’s descent into madness a plausibility absent elsewhere in Emilia Pérez. Her frustrations with the justice system and rage against the violent treatment of women and girls resonates in a film in which little else does.

The critical acclaim greeting Emilia Pérez isn’t just bewildering, it also reflects the hypocrisy of Hollywood. It seems all manner of moral and artistic failures can be excused in the name of trans-rights advocacy. The cultural elites have never looked so out of touch.

Raquel Rosario Sanchez is a writer, campaigner and researcher from the Dominican Republic.