‘Emilia Pérez’ Is A Musical That’s Sadly Too Dull To Be Provocative

Is there anything worse than a dull musical? Emilia Pérez has a number of huge problems – a highly questionable depiction of both Mexico and the trans experience, incredibly muddied themes and a really poor soundtrack to name a few of them – but above all else, it’s a film that left me profoundly bored for much of its runtime as it so transparently fails to provoke or offer insight in a meaningful way. 

The film follows the leader of a Mexican drug cartel, Manitas, who wishes to leave the position and transition to a woman with the help of lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldaña). After her operation, the cartel leader takes on the moniker of Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón) and tries to walk the road of redemption, bringing her children back into her life and starting an NGO to find victims of the cartels. 

It’s an… audacious premise, I’ll give it that. Director Jacques Audiard (who I should add is French directing a Spanish-language musical) is certainly unafraid to make big decisions during the runtime of Emilia Pérez, but it’s quite rare that they pay off. It’s a film that feels like it’s constantly blundering, throwing thousands of ideas at the proverbial wall with very few making impact in a meaningful way.

A musical without good music?

The film’s greatest flaw simply has to be the fact it’s, put simply, quite a bad musical. The tracks range from feeling barely sung to actively terrible, and the film doesn’t nail either its small or big musical moments. Worse still, the actual choreography and energy in each musical setpiece is virtually non-existent bar a few sequences like the opening or the (somehow) Golden Globe-winning track El Mal.

I think the El Mal sequence represents Emilia Pérez in a microcosm, flaunting its few highs and many lows. In it, Rita and Emilia attend a gala for their NGO, and Rita bursts into song in her head while Emilia gives a speech about the work that they’re doing. 

Zoe Saldaña does the best that she can here and in the rest of the film, and I suppose the sequence is shot well-enough, even if it feels like it’s trying too hard to be flashy. But it’s strange because El Mal introduces a seemingly key theme of corruption that the film doesn’t ever explore again in a really poor-sounding musical number that takes place in one of our characters’ heads. It’s indicative of Emilia Pérez’s strange problem: despite having a million ideas and bouncing between thirty different tones, it rarely excites or offends. 

One front where it does offend, though, is in its supposed “representation” of both trans people and Mexico. Not only does the main cast of the film only feature one Mexican actress (Adrianna Paz, who is fine in the movie), Audiard has also admitted publicly he didn’t do much research into Mexican culture before directing Emilia Pérez, which you kinda feel just seeing how he depicts the country. 

Emilia Pérez is highly questionable representation

But I’d be surprised if Audiard did much research on the trans experience either, given all the harmful tropes in the character of Emilia. To her credit, Karla Sofía Gascón (a trans actress in real life) puts in considerable effort to try and make Emilia feel like a real, complicated person, and she gives the best performance in the film behind Saldaña. 

Unfortunately, the script has too many fundamental issues in how Emilia is depicted to be anything close to good representation.               The fact she transitions as a means of “escape” from her life of crime and continually lies to her kids and ex-wife (an extremely middling Selena Gomez) plays into transphobic harmful rhetoric, especially considering the film never reckons with her genuinely criminal past.

Even worse than that, Emilia’s voice dips back into a lower register anytime she gets angry or does something reminiscent of her old self; a baffling decision belied by the film’s numerous other transphobic traits and tropes. Why does Emilia Pérez refer to herself as “half man, half woman” during one of its pivotal, yet drab moments? Audiard seemingly suggests that trans people are unsure of their identity post-transition, which is untrue, and seemingly never allows Emilia to reckon with the truth of her identity either personally or publicly.

And yet, Emilia Pérez is so surprisingly dull that I genuinely find mustering the energy required to discuss its weak and offensive elements a taxing task. It’s a bad film, no doubt, but not the kind you can find delicious ironic enjoyment in watching or a sick sense of entertainment. Despite its apparent desire to offend and provoke, it’s ultimately more interesting to ponder why Emilia Pérez was made than it is to actually watch it.

★

Emilia Pérez is in cinemas now.