Netflix's Emilia Pérez could have been a fun, campy crime musical — but it's not

When watching the new Netflix film Emilia Pérez, you should expect the unexpected.

The musical film set this year's festival circuit ablaze with its unique and surprising story about a trans woman who leads a Mexican drug cartel.

It may sound like a campy hit, but some critics have pointed out that the movie is far from progressive considering how it leans into harmful stereotypes to portray both its central trans narrative and its setting of Mexico.

Today on Commotion, culture critics Cristina Escobar, Sarah-Tai Black and Reanna Cruz join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to review the polarizing crime musical film Emilia Pérez.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Karla Sofía Gascón is playing Emilia Pérez both pre- and post-transition. I think it's an incredible performance. Reanna, talk about this character.

Reanna: I agree, I think the acting was really great from Gascón, but I agree that the script was not really giving. Emilia Pérez as a character, to me, feels like what a cisgender man would imagine in their head about a trans woman, where she never really lets go of the man inside her and it comes back to haunt her, and all of these things that are toxic representations of the trans narrative, particularly trans femininity. And I saw that manifest over the course of the movie. 

I think the script has a lot of lines in it that equate to things like, who am I? Or like, "She's a he-she," and things like that … which kind of left a bad taste in my mouth, especially because this movie is supposed to be an uplifting representation of women. You want to go into the movie and be left with — I don't know, not a weird feeling in your stomach. As I was watching Emilia Pérez I was like, the way this character is portrayed in terms of her transness feels particularly irresponsible to me.

Elamin: Sarah-Tai, I know you also had issues with the way that Emilia's transition was portrayed. I want to talk about one of the first songs in the movie. This is one that takes place in a hospital in Thailand. Doctors are singing about the many medical procedures available…. How did you feel at this moment in the movie?

Sarah-Tai: I mean, this song is really emblematic of the whole movie…. It's this very genital-focused, reductive idea of what transitioning is, especially for trans women. Yes, transition obviously involves gender-affirming surgery for a lot of people. But to locate it so specifically in this, so exploitively in this, is really reductive. It's really gross. It brings you back to '90s daytime television, you know? Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, all the exploitation of trans women we saw happening in the very same way, where it was really like, "Tell me about your penis." It wasn't care for the actual person, their actual history or their story. It's really dehumanizing. 

And if I may say glibly, worse than that, they had an opportunity to lean into some real camp here. But because of the gaze and the thinking of this film's director, we're taking a sharp left instead towards something that's actually taking itself seriously while also being comically bad. I was thinking of something like Rocky Horror — a very problematic text, obviously, but has obviously been reclaimed by queer and trans audiences because it's just the spectacle of it, the bursting through into this queer trans plane that's just bananas. The potential is there, but this director is just not the one to take what could be a very campy story about a trans woman cartel boss — like, imagine that on paper!

Elamin: That's a great premise. 

Sarah-Tai: That could be so fun depending on the director. But instead here, we've taken this weird trip down like a cis French man's fantasy of what trans experience is, especially located in Mexico.

Elamin: Let's get into the Mexico of it all, Cristina, because this is a movie that is set in Mexico. It is entirely shot on soundstages in Paris. What do you make of this representation of Mexico? 

Cristina: Emilia Pérez is a wild ride. If you can just throw your hands up and be like, I don't know where this thing is going to take me, and let it carry you, then there is I think some joy and wildness to it, even though it's nuts. However, it's clearly made by a white, straight French guy and he's trying to depict things he doesn't know about. And there's a huge distance between him and his characters, between him and his setting. It's certainly seen in the trans character, in the reduction to stereotypes, but it's also seen in the setting of Mexico. This movie could have been on Mars as well as it could have been in Mexico. Like, there is a light inspiration, right, where they're like, "This market is pretty. Let's recreate it on this soundstage." And it looks beautiful, but there's no real knowledge or deep understanding of what it is to be Mexican.

I'm Mexican-American, so I'm a set removed. I wouldn't be doing this thing that he's doing. But what you see is in the film, everybody in Mexico is either part of the cartel or a victim of the cartel. It's 100 per cent defined by this type of violence. And I'm sorry, there's just more. There's a whole society out there, and people living their lives, and other identities and other ways to understand what it is to be Mexican in Mexico. And the film just doesn't have any even curiosity about those things. It's just a playground for them to make this wacky musical with all these twists and turns. That remove really makes it hard to connect because there's such a big distance between the people telling the story and the characters they're trying to depict and the place they're trying to show.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.