“Emilia Pérez”, loved by critics, hated by audiences
“Emilia Pérez.” The name is now synonymous with controversy and contempt. However when the world was first introduced to the film at the Cannes Film Festival, it was met with critical acclaim.
Renowned American critic Leonard Matlin wrote about the film, “Phrases like ‘game-changer’ and ‘cutting-edge’ can’t capture just how audacious and original Emilia Pérez is.” After its Cannes Festival screening, the film's director, Jacques Audiard enjoyed an 11 minute standing ovation. Audiard also went on to win the Jury Prize, and actresses Karla Sofia Gascon, Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana and Adriana Paz all shared the best actress award.
“Emilia Pérez” came out of Cannes being one of the most hyped movies of the festival. The film had a relatively quiet release on the streaming platform Netflix in November of 2024. Its adulations would only continue as it went on to be nominated for a record breaking 13 Academy Awards. However, these nominations, coupled with the film's strong performance at the Golden Globes, would also serve as a catalyst that would bring viral attention to the film, and with it, viral controversy.
After the film gained the public's attention for its nominations, curious audience members who watched the film found several issues with its portrayal of the Mexican and LGBTQ communities. The movie Emilia Pérez revolves around the story of Mexican drug trafficker, Manitas Del Monte, and their transition into womanhood and into the titular character, Emilia Pérez. Ironically, the film failed to capture the hearts and minds of either the LGBTQ or the Mexican community, with both of these communities having some of the film's loudest critics.
Popular movie reviewing app Letterboxd has served as a means for many casual movie enthusiasts to express their issues with the film. Many users found issues with the film's authenticity, like Letterboxd user comrade_yui who wrote, “Liberal-centrists can seemingly only understand queerness as 'the exceptional' to their 'normality', so they make a hyperbolic spectacle out of us and then go on to say that it's good optics, that it's 'representation', when in fact it is abstraction and dehumanization -- Emilia Pérez is made to represent so many contradictory things that in the end the film situates her as an icon rather than a real person, it is a crude mystification of everything the film claims to care about.”
While comrade_yui was speaking specifically about the lack of authenticity and tact when it comes to the topic of the transgender experience, this same issue is echoed by users who found issues with the film's representation of Mexico and the Mexican community. Like user Sergioab, whose thoughts have been translated from Spanish, “The idea of a story centered around a macho drug dealer who yearns to become a woman was extremely interesting. It could have touched on many themes with a strong social context, but somehow it ended up being a cringe-filled musical with completely uninformed reflections on Mexican issues.”
Reviews and discussions much like these propagated social media, and were how casual movie watchers like myself were first introduced to the film. My first viewing of “Emilia Pérez” came in the midst of this controversy. First and foremost, while not well equipped to delve into the lack of authenticity in the film's portrayal of LGBTQ and Mexican stories, I did agree that many of the characters felt like tokens of their identity rather than real, fleshed out personalities.
Admittedly, I was not impressed. While interesting visually, the aesthetics of the film were not enough to outweigh an at times nonsensical and overall weak plotline. But beyond my initial disappointment, there was a curiosity.
What did I miss? What did so many critics see that I and so many of those in the general public failed to appreciate? Was my opinion tainted by all the Letterboxd reviews and TikToks I had consumed prior to watching? As someone who has always had an appreciation for art house films, I wanted in on the hype.
I spoke with Santa Monica College (SMC) professor and head of the film department Dr. Salvador Carrasco, and asked him about why there was such a wide disconnect between the audience and the critics.
“Not that it’s always the case, but in an ideal world the expectation is that critics approach a film bringing an arsenal of historical references, cinematic background or knowledge, exposure to all sorts of levels of artistic disciplines, and the basic goal of assessing what exactly the filmmaker is trying to do,” said Carrasco.
“Conversely, the average viewer tends to take on a movie with less of a framework and sparser references… Since all of us, critics and general audiences alike, are inevitably human-all-too-human, we can often get swept up in the cultural zeitgeist of overpraising and hating films. We are malleable, and many of us can easily walk into a movie with bad faith.”
What Carrasco says here definitely resonated with my first experience watching the film. I felt slightly vindicated in my preconceived notions of the film because I felt that it would otherwise be irresponsible of me to look past the sensitive discussions that fueled my notions.
However Carrasco had something interesting to say when it comes to the realism and authenticity of the film, “Emilia Pérez is a formalistic, highly stylized film that should not be assessed with the critical toolkit of realism (or traditional musicals, for that matter), lest we try to ‘understand’ Rothko through the prism of Raphael, only to get incredibly frustrated in the process.”
Carrasco’s comparison of the film to an abstract Rothko painting being held to the scrutiny of a classical Raphael painting was the proverbial “lightbulb” that helped me understand exactly what I was missing, the correct context.
When I first watched “Emilia Pérez” I approached it ready from the perspective of a skeptic looking to find the issues which others had claimed were present in the film. Of course if you go into a movie as stylized and aesthetic as this one looking for the realism and true authenticity of, say, a documentary, one would come back disappointed.
While the film does tackle sensitive topics in an extremely stylized and aesthetically subversive way, its goal isn’t to inform, it is to evoke emotion. The merit of the film lies less in the literal depictions of these hardships and more in depicting the abstract emotions that surround the story of “Emilia Pérez” and her co-stars.
This argument doesn’t invalidate the clear issues of authenticity and representation in the film, but it does show a perspective where accuracy may not be as important. When you see the film from this perspective, the story transforms into a story about the evolution of two women's journey. As Professor Carrasco says, “It is through a multiplicity of stories and viewpoints that society makes progress regarding truly diverse representation and the tolerance to otherness that can only result from openness and dialogue… more movies less canceling.”