A Latecomer To Emilia Perez (2024): What’s All The Fuss About?

My sudden interest in the Oscars has not necessarily come from a fascination about the ceremony itself, which is always a deeply cringe-worthy affair that has to pad out time between each award and acceptance speech with bizarre jokes and banal platitudes. The only reason I’ve been interested the last couple of years is simply down to how many films I’ve seen that are up for contention, and I want to see the decisions made on what are considered the best in their eyes.

Of course, the Academy has always had its issues. Studios have been tailor-making films that fit the cliched requirements of the Academy for decades now, and the lack of diversity has always been an issue. Say what you will about how much diversity there is in this film which has thirteen nominations to its name, but there’s still only one female director in the Best Director category and Will & Harper didn’t get nominated for anything so – swings and roundabouts?

The biggest story this year in the news regarding nominations is Emilia Pérez, the musical crime drama about the titular drug cartel boss, who is helped by a criminal lawyer to undergo gender-reassignment surgery and begin a new life. Directed by Jacques Audiard, who I previously covered with his excellent Western ‘The Sisters Brothers’, the film stars some recognisable faces including Zoe Saldana (Avatar, Guardians Of The Galaxy), Edgar Ramirez (Zero Dark Thirty, Jungle Cruise), and Selena Gomez (bland pop music that I can’t even enjoy on a nostalgic level, plus Spring Breakers). It also features some rising stars, the main one of course being Emilia Perez herself, Spanish actress Karla Sofiá Gascón. She is the first transgender actress to be nominated in the Best Actress category of the Oscars, and that’s only one of thirteen nominations the film has received such as Best Director, Best International Feature Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song and, the big one, Best Picture. 

I first heard of the film back in October, when it had a limited theatrical run before going to Netflix. I didn’t get a chance to see it in cinemas but likewise when it came out on the platform I was knee-deep in assignments so the initial buzz passed me by. Now all of a sudden, the film’s become the most controversial release of all last year. I knew that the widely divided reaction to the film’s exploration of its social issues, plus the amount of buzz it received at the Golden Globes, meant that I’d have to watch it at some point but now that it’s been nominated this many times at the Oscars, I finally sat down and watched it. And let’s just say that if this wins Best Picture, it will undoubtedly be the worst Best Picture winner of the entire 21st century. Yes, that includes Crash.

Ignoring all the controversy surrounding the film’s approach to its themes for a second, what struck me about Emilia Pérez is just how weak it is on a script and direction level. I’ve only seen one Audiard film before but his direction was really solid, and he knew how to make the film visually arresting as well as tell the story in a coherent way. By contrast, Emilia Pérez is visually all over the place – the lighting is extremely harsh one minute and dull and flat the next, and the musical numbers also visually stick out like a sore thumb. Audiard can never decide whether he wants to make the numbers full choreographed pieces, or whether he wants a more normal set-up where his cast just so happen to be singing. Either way, they’re a mess.

The songs are also just really bad. I’m lucky in the sense that I haven’t watched any musicals where the songs are just straight-up crap, but at least I’ve got an example for the future. Many people have already ripped the song ‘La Vaginoplastia’ a new one, which it very much deserves, but the rest of the songs are just a tuneless mess. I was less than halfway through, we’d had at least six songs, and I couldn’t tell any of them apart, barring of course ‘La Vaginoplastia’ which is honestly inexcusable. Say what you will about Joker: Folie A Deux, which came out at a similar time as this, and how scared that was to be a musical, but at least the songs they were singing were by Sinatra, or timeless standards from classic musicals. By contrast, Emilia Pérez’s songs suffer from the same flaw as the film’s overall tone: trying so hard to be weird that they forget to be good.

It’s extremely hard for me, as a straight white guy, to fully explain what doesn’t work about the film’s approach to the theme of trans identity. Gascón herself seems to be very appreciative of her character’s story, and the film spends a great deal of time in the middle stretch showing Emilia reconnecting with her family after going into hiding. As a simple concept, that’s a really heartfelt and interesting story. However, there are major issues that come with it. For one, that story is surrounded by all the film’s zany elements which serve as artifice and needlessly convolute the story, but the film’s obsession with the gender-reassignment process (again, that bloody song) feels offensively heavy-handed, always feeling the need to remind the audience. I may not be able to relate to this story, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that I don’t care. The film’s approach is so wild, so raucous and so unsubtle that it hasn’t allowed me time to breathe and settle into the world that it’s created. 

And for a film that has this much going on, it finds itself with annoyingly little to say. After the extremely chaotic opening this becomes a real slog and I felt every second of the 132 minutes. I’d lost all interest by the time we got to the ending because, for a film that is aiming for positive universal messages, it comes across as obtuse and inaccessible. 

So let’s go back to the attention it’s received at the Oscars. The Academy loves films that have a point to make, and we can see that theme in many of the recent Best Picture winners – the social satire of Parasite, the race relations in Green Book, and man-made threat in Oppenheimer. They also tend to champion the more eccentric films in the line-up. Look no further than Everything Everywhere All At Once, which won Best Picture two years ago over more traditional picks such as The Fabelmans and All Quiet On The Western Front. These traditions can definitely be seen in the selection of nominees this year. Nickel Boys and Anora can fit into that first bracket, and The Substance is tailor-made to fit into the second one. Emilia Perez ticks both of those boxes: it crosses and blends genres in deliberately strange and quirky ways while attempting to have social commentary. However, there’s a strong difference between Emilia Perez and all those other films. For starters, all those other films are good.  

Everything Everywhere wore its wholehearted weirdness on its sleeve but was also universally appealing, and effortlessly inclusive in its depiction of marginalised groups. It was a genuinely good watch and it’s stayed in my memory. Emilia Perez, by contrast, has been thrashed by people in Mexico where the film is “set” (it was actually shot in Paris, France), for its narrow-minded and simplistic view of Mexican culture, and has also been heavily criticised by LGBTQ+ groups and charities for the aforementioned exploration of trans identity, and even those controversial elements aren’t enough to save the film from its biggest sin: it’s a boring mess.

Since Emilia Perez has been nominated for this many Oscars, it’s bound to win at least one or two and I’m not necessarily saying it shouldn’t – the costume department clearly showed up to work here, and Zoe Saldana is trying her best with the material. But if it wins Best Picture, then it will be all the proof that the Oscars are out-of-date and out-of-touch. I highly doubt that The Substance will walk away with Best Picture given the company surrounding it, but that’s an example of a film that shocks and surprises an audience in twisted and subversive ways, and also respects that audience. Emilia Perez does not respect its audience: it alienates, bores and offends them. 

Academy voters, I will never trust you, but all I ask is that you don’t give this any more attention. It doesn’t deserve it.

Alex’s Archive – Emilia Perez