Emilia Pérez doesn’t know what to do with its transness

I don’t think that Emilia Pérez is a film that operates in bad faith.

The one-line summary of the film — a put-upon lawyer helps a drug lord escape Mexico in order to undergo gender reassignment — is one that could be seen as fraught, to put it lightly. But Jacques Audiard’s gonzo film—a musical in a year when the movie musical has been raked across the coals from Wonka and Wicked: Part One to Joker: Folie a Deux—bends over backwards to try and present the most (self)-congratulating, liberal portrait of trans acceptance. It’s important to understand here that the word liberal should be treated as a slur. Because for all of its good intentions — and it has plenty of them, evidenced by Zoe Saldaña’s Rita singing directly to the camera, pleading to the audience, about how she’ll defend trans people — Emilia Pérez doesn’t seem to know how it wants to define transness, much less what it wants to say about it.

What does try to say is—to put it generously—confused and uncertain, at once offering a simple, almost sanctifying view of trans identity while pandering to some of the most played out and tired tropes that are found in contemporary anti-trans rhetoric. It start with simple things, the kind that you can probably credit to a writer/director who just doesn’t know much about trans people or spend much time with them. There’s the fact that, even before transitioning, Emilia is constantly referred to by everyone — including Rita, her supposed advocate—by her dead name and pronouns. But if this was just a case of mistaken pronouns, the “he’s a little confused, but he’s got the spirit” meme from Fresh Prince of Bel Air would suffice, and this essay could have been a tweet.

Unfortunately, none of us are that lucky.

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Transness aside, the songs in Emilia Pérez are among the many (many, many) divisive things about the film. But those songs, along with the central performances of the three women — Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón in the title role, and Selena Gomez as Jessi, Emilia’s wife prior to transition — are the things that remain the most compelling. They’re as chaotic as everything else about the film, used with an uncoordinated abandon but staged with zeal. Highlights include the opening number, “El Alegato,” which slowly animates an ensemble around Rita to create Audiard’s portrait of Mexico, and both of Gomez’s numbers, “Bienvenida” and “Mi Camino,” which take interesting risks with staging. But the songs are not immune from the uncertain trans politics of the film. In “Vaginoaplasty,” a gung-ho surgeon and Rita discuss the many cosmetic, gender affirming options available to Emilia, all while walking through a surgery ward. The fanatical zeal that goes into this song presents it as the kind of Final Boss of transition, the thing that one needs to do in order to be seen as Really Seriously Trans. The film doesn’t really have a working definition of trans identity, more an amalgamation of tropes and talking points, something amplified by the fact that we never really spend time with a pre-transition Emilia. Her previous self exists as a strange, ominous figure — Gacón under layers of makeup and a fake beard, looming in the shadows and talking in a gravelly voice, with the potential for violence — demonstrating appropriate levels of transness and childhood suffering to doctors in order to be allowed to transition. Which, of course, she does. 

Emilia Pérez bends over backwards to try and present the most (self)-congratulating, liberal portrait of trans acceptance.

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But what makes this transition more fraught than celebratory is rooted in the film’s uncertain point of view. We never really see things through the eyes of the title character, so often her gender (and sense of self) is relayed to us through Rita and Jessi. In “Deseo,” an agonized ballad about Emilia’s dysphoria gets filtered through the lens of Jessi’s grief. For her, out of the loop on Emilia’s deepest desire, Emilia’s transition is nothing more than the death of her husband. But a filmmaking decision like this can never exist  in a vacuum, and its impossible to look at the feelings the film gives primacy to (Jessi’s) without thinking of the constant tabloid headlines and social media screeds from transphobic parents and partners that lament “losing” or “grieving” a loved one that dares to transition. And yet, for a post-transition Emilia, there’s no sense of grief or loss. Instead, there’s a sense of becoming that’s complicated by the ease and immediacy with which she passes.

When Emilia re-enters Rita’s life during a dinner in London, nobody gives her a second glance and Emilia is, for all intents and purposes, a (cis-passing) woman. On the surface, this is fine. What’s more interesting, more complicated, and more messy, is what Emilia now seems to have become representative of throughout the film. She’s someone who is practically rushed into sainthood due to nonprofit she sets up to find the bodies buried by the cartels of her former life (a way for the character, or the film to absolve themselves of the violence that they struggle to engage with a meaningful way), loved and beloved by everyone for this choice (except a terse, uncertain Jessi.) Audiard seems to have nothing meaningful to say about the relationship between this post-transition activism and the violent realities that preceded it, as if to say that transition is simply a wiping clean of the slate. The woman that now stands before the characters, the audience, the world, is totally disconnected from all she did and was before resurfacing. This stance would, for all of its aggressively violent simplicity, be something approaching a thesis on transness: that it is a rebirth from zero, a refutation of the person and the life that came before.

But Audiard’s film doesn’t settle for that.

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Because of course, in the final act, violence returns to Emilia (or Emilia returns to violence.) Afraid that she’ll lose the close relationship she developed with her children by posing her pre-transition self’s sister, she gets to enjoy one of the most tender scenes in the films, one that’s willing to accept the past and present of trans life, when her son recognizes her scent as belonging to his former father in the song “Papa.” He confronts Jessi, who has been rekindling a romance with an old lover and plans to move away with him and the children. It’s in this confrontation that the voice of Emilia’s pre-transition self returns—that gravelly, violent voice. This moment sends what could first be looked at as a well-intentioned, if uninformed and surface level portrait of a trans character, veering into something else. What that is, I don’t think I could say. But that moment presents transition more like being The Incredible Hulk than anything else, as if the “maleness” in Emilia was simply pushed into some metaphysical closet in the back of her head after surgery and transition, only for it to kick down the door and emerge when called on to commit violence.

It’s here that Audiard seems to point at Emilia with a trembling finger, at the presumed aggression looming under the surface, and consider her nothing more than a man in a dress. As if transition were an elaborate disguise, and Emilia’s closeted self, a figure of violence and fear, was an inescapable North Star for Emilia, even as she tries to absolve for her past actions.

But what if I told you that wasn’t the end of the bizarre roller coaster ride of what Emilia Perez tries to do with transness?

One of the film’s climactic scenes is a hostage situation (Jessi and her lover kidnapping Emilia to try and get Jessi’s money back) and shootout, in which Jessi and Emilia are caught in the crossfire. Emilia reveals the truth of her former life to Jessi in a ballad that could have been moving, could have been interesting, could have had something concrete to say about Emilia’s identity, and Jessi’s relationship to it. But it doesn’t. Framing this as a moment of tenderness in the eye of the storm as bullets fly around them is a good idea, but the song can’t escape the thousand cuts that Emilia Perez has already inflicted on trans identity. Even in this moment of reconciliation, the film can’t escape the insane binary it managed to created with Emilia’s pre-transition self on one side, and Emilia on the other. Jessi always refers to Emilia as “Manitas,” or her “husband.” For a film that seems to want to do so much to sanctify Emilia, it refuses to see her as anything other than an idea.

It’s ironic, but in a deeply unsurprising way, that a film that contorts itself to be on the “right side of history” of trans issues through Rita, is unable to actually let Emilia feel like a person.♦

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