‘Emilia Pérez’ review: Karla Gascón’s performance deserves a better film

Despite its important trans representation, Emilia Pérez succumbs to common tropes that diminish the nuanced and diverse reality of Mexico.

Mexico, like the rest of Latin America, is complex, multilayered, chaotic, and beautiful. Films that attempt to capture this rich reality, especially when directed by artists from outside the region, must take care to avoid reductive stereotypes that portray the place and its people as one-dimensional. Unfortunately, Jacques Audiard’s new crime-comedy musical Emilia Pérez falls short of this goal.

Loosely based on a novel by Boris Razon, Emilia Pérez centers around Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a Mexico City lawyer dissatisfied with her career and struggling to make ends meet. She is contacted by Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), a mysterious cartel leader grappling with gender identity and wanting to live fully as a trans woman. Emilia seeks Rita’s help to transition, fake her death, escape her life of crime, and leave her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez). Years later, after Emilia starts a nonprofit to help those affected by violence in Mexico, the trio is forced to confront ghosts from Emilia’s past that threaten the life they are trying to build.

Telenovela cheesiness without context

Emilia Pérez is structured like an operetta with two distinct acts and follows the genre’s tradition of portraying reality as artificial. In some moments, it evokes classics like Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The cinematography and blocking are inventive at times, especially in the opening musical number set in a bustling Mexico City market introduced by the beloved vendor audio recordings that request household audiences. However, the film’s commitment to the operetta format fails to capture the richness of its subject matter. Mexico has a vast musical tradition, with genres like corridos tumbados addressing themes relevant to the movie. Yet Camille and Clément Ducol’s music feels detached from Mexico’s reality, and techniques like Sprechstimme (when performers recite pitches instead of singing them) are vastly ineffective when combined with some of the modern musical choices that the film attempts to make.

Additionally, while some lyrical elements draw inspiration from telenovela dialogue, they come across as stereotypical and melodramatic. Telenovelas have a context that makes their cheesiness work, but Emilia Pérez misses these nuances, resulting in dialogue that seems to mock telenovelas and perpetuate stereotypes of Mexican culture. Karla Sofía Gascón still delivers a phenomenal performance as Emilia, bringing a subtlety and tenderness to the rather difficult role that stands out amidst the film’s broader missteps. Her portrayal deserves the acclaim it’s receiving for its significance to trans representation.

However, Emilia’s transformation from criminal leader to charitable activist feels rushed and shallow. There’s little reflection on the harm caused by her criminal past, and it seems as though she uses the suffering of real people to conceal her history. This approach would not be as problematic if the violence the film attempts to address weren’t such a pressing issue in Mexican society. By glossing over this complexity, the movie irresponsibly trivializes the problem.

A failure of imagination

It’s not all flaws and failed framing, though. The frenetic pace of Emilia Pérez helps smooth over the rough patches of the script, and a few musical numbers are catchy and some of the choreography is effective in matching the overall tone of the film. The soundtrack also uses very interesting harmonic choices that go beyond standard musical-theater fare and engages with contemporary trends in classical music. In addition, some of the action sequences in the third act, were quite thrilling and definitively memorable.

But poor casting choices, particularly Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldaña, undermine these strengths. Debates about Latin identity and who belongs in the Latin community are running wild on the internet, though I firmly believe that Spanish proficiency should not be a requirement for Latinidad. However, the supporting cast’s lack of Spanish fluency (especially in the musical numbers) creates a disconnect with the audience and amplifies the sense of mockery rather than homage. Although the script tries to justify this with character background explanations, it feels like a cop-out, prioritizing star power over authentic representation.

The bottom line

One could argue that because the film is a musical, it doesn’t need to adhere strictly to reality. The film’s incorporation of crime thrillers, comedy and LGBTQ themes are a welcome expansion of what the genre a musical can be. Yet, the saddest part of Emilia Pérez is that it fails to imagine a Mexico that is more than the sum of its struggles. Karla Sofía Gascón’s performance and the film’s effort to elevate LGBTQ voices deserve a story that engages more deeply with the reality of Mexico, rather than settling for surface-level portrayals.

Emilia Pérez is now playing in select theaters and on Netflix starting November 13. You can watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Netflix. You can read more reviews by Pedro Luis Graterol here.