Now that “Emilia Pérez” is streaming on Netflix, more people are able to critique this profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.
While the film garnered rave reviews when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, none of those reviews were written by trans people. There is an ongoing challenge with high-profile film festivals programming films about trans people – which are then seen and reviewed by cisgender critics – months before an actual transgender person can even see the film. This happened in 2018 with the film “Girl,” also acquired by Netflix at Cannes.
While some reviews praise the performances in “Emilia Pérez” or the film’s production values, critics who are focused on the film’s trans representation tell a very different story. We’ve collected several of those reviews below – most of them by transgender critics. These critics understand how inauthentic portrayals of trans people are offensive and even dangerous.
If these reviews make you want to learn more about the history of trans representation in film and television, you can watch the groundbreaking documentary “Disclosure” which Netflix bought at Sundance in 2020. “Disclosure” is an in-depth examination of the way film and television peddled distorted, defamatory stories about transgender people for over 100 years. Once you watch “Disclosure,” you’ll see how “Emilia Pérez” recycles the trans stereotypes, tropes, and clichés of the not-so-distant past.
“Emilia Pérez” is a step backward for trans representation. Netflix is also streaming the new documentary “Will & Harper” in which a transgender woman shares her own story in her own words. Here is a story about films and shows about trans people that received a GLAAD Media Award nomination last year. This is the type of trans representation the world needs now more than ever.
Emilia Pérez’s Biggest Problem Is Emilia Pérez by Harron Walker
“I don’t demand total realism from every film that I see. I can even appreciate the camp, whether intentional or not, of Emilia waking up from her 5-million simultaneous surgeries, her face bandaged like a mummy save for her eyes and lips. But I expect that a filmmaker so taken by the concept of transitioning, one who’s displayed a certain level of conscious sensitivity in his previous efforts to depict lives unlike his own, to at least display an informed understanding of what that concept actually looks like in practice.”
“‘Gender transition seems to fascinate just about everyone who hasn’t gone through it,” the Canadian author Casey Plett once wrote in critiquing what she termed ‘gender novels,’ or fiction that utilizes transness as a metaphor to help cis people learn something new about themselves. Plett’s analysis is very much applicable to Emilia’s transition and the purpose it serves in the film. For Epifanía, Emilia’s girlfriend played by Paz, it’s a lesson in giving yourself permission to ‘be free … as free as the air.’ For Rita and Emilia’s transphobic Israeli surgeon, it’s fodder for a thought experiment. Despite agreeing to do the procedures, the surgeon suggests that instead of having plastic surgery, ‘he,’ meaning Emilia, ‘better change his mind,’ adding that although the surgeon can change Emilia’s body, ‘you cannot change the soul.’ To this, Rita argues, ‘Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.’ There, I guess, is a Monkey’s Paw morsel of realism: two cis people debating the ethics of transness without any trans people present.”
Emilia Pérez review – a musical that barely wants to be a musical by Juan Barquin
“In their very first scene together, Rita literally gasps with disgust at Emilia (in boy-mode drag as Manitas) opening her shirt to ‘prove’ she’s serious about transitioning. Though the audience, blessedly, isn’t shown the small breasts she’s presumably grown with two years of hormones, the reaction shot alone being played like a body horror reveal is enough.
The film’s regressive politics are everywhere, not just in the way Emilia’s transition is presented (complete with a ‘woman stares at her new vagina through a pocket mirror’ shot that bafflingly comes while Emilia is still bandaged from head to toe after surgery). Any time Emilia ‘reverts’ to her ‘old ways’, Gascon lowers her vocal register as if to equate masculinity with evil and femininity with good. Men may be no more than props, but no woman’s narrative arc is remotely well-developed, Audiard shrugging aside any attempt at fleshing them out, having them blandly deliver their lines (with poor Gomez unable to finish some of them in her in-film native language of Spanish) until they are disposed of.”
‘Emilia Pérez’ Is the Most Unique Cis Nonsense You’ll Ever See by Drew Burnett Gregory
“Whether made by us or about us, I want more trans stories that are audacious, ambitious, and new. The problem with Emilia Pérez is that while it’s new in some ways it’s very, very tired in others.
The film hits just about every trans trope you can imagine:
- Trans woman killer
- Tragic trans woman
- Trans woman abandons her wife and children to transition
- Transition treated as a death
- Deadnaming and misgendering at pivotal moments
- Trans woman described as half male/half female”
“This is the entire experience of the film. A wonderful awe is felt during a musical number or when the film allows its trans character to act in ways we rarely see on-screen. And then a line of dialogue will be said or a narrative choice will be made that feels at best an eye-roll and at worst a gut punch.
Emilia Pérez is a glorious disaster. Not since Xavier Dolan’s “Laurence Anyways” has a trans film been so bold and so boring all at once. But it’s been over a decade since that film and my patience is waning. Certainly, this shallow understanding of trans people can’t still be interesting to cis people. How many times do cis people have to learn about us before a portrayal like this one rings as false to them as it does to me?”
‘Emilia Pérez’ is Netflix’s divisive musical about a trans cartel boss with Shar Jossell & Reanna Cruz
CRUZ: The movie failed in multiple ways, I think in large ways too. I thought it was stereotyping Mexicans. I thought it was stereotyping trans women.
CRUZ: The entire time I was watching it I had a really weird feeling in my stomach because to me it seemed like the filmmaker was painting trans women as liars. Liars and people that can’t tell the truth and they don’t know who they are. And the songs kind of lean into that. Where half of the songs you have Emilia singing ‘Who am I?’ or talking about ‘I was a he and now I’m a she.’
JOSSELL: I questioned when I was watching this, do we have enough diversity in storytelling to be putting stories like this out that kind of just feed the machine instead of challenging the machine? And the answer was no. That’s not to say that we can’t have crappy trans representation, but I still stand on: there’s not enough trans representation to make space for the crappy representation. And I’m not even being subjective with this. It is crappy. It literally leans into harmful tropes…I felt that it did trivialize the trans experience and really reduce trans people to these, like, selfish deceivers. And I hated it.
Reverse Shot: Emilia Pérez by Caden Mark Gardner
“Audiard may have had the best intentions, as he has worked with trans performers before (including Rebecca Root in ‘The Sisters Brothers’), but there is not enough interiority given to his trans lead to provide any emotional stakes as the character winds her way to inevitable martyrdom. There is rarely any palpable sense of anxiety as Emilia looks over her shoulder, not only for the crime world’s potential retribution against her but also the systemic transphobia and the risk of violence tied to being a trans person who can be outed against their will. The closest the viewers get to Emilia’s inability to keep up appearances is when her children are involved—these rare moments are humanizing, showing that on some level she is acting out of some level of selfishness and pride.
Perhaps I ultimately cannot muster a strong reaction one way or another to Emilia Perez because I have become numb to the idea of liberal pablum as respite for the dreadful realities that await trans people like me in the United States. What has actually shocked me has been seeing the Vice President-elect openly gloat about his transphobia on podcasts and more than $200 million dollars in anti-trans ads being poured into the recent U.S. election, in which Mexicans and trans people became interchangeable existential threats to societal order by Trump supporters. It’s not that I thought significant progress had been made or that “the world was ready for us,” but witnessing a certain strain of transphobic malice that had been fomented by online far-right internet trolls being transferred to the highest office in the world, is a surreal development, one that American society needs to reckon with. With its storytelling stumbles and lackluster music, Emilia Perez was never going to be a film that I could embrace, but its arrival in this moment in history feels like botched punchline of a cosmic joke.”
Emilia Pérez is a groundbreaking trainwreck by David Opie
“But just as Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody were crafted with white people and the straights in mind, the same can also be said for Emilia Pérez. Except, this time around, it’s the cis viewers who are being placated in this insensitive mess of a film that’s already drawn criticism from a wide number of trans journalists (see Drew Burnett Gregory’s stellar review at Autostraddle, for example).”
“On the surface of it all, you’d be hard pressed to suggest that Emilia Pérez is boring. The musical numbers especially are quite audacious at times, both structurally and formally speaking. Yet it’s the film’s preoccupation with the surface exterior of Emilia herself that ends up being tedious, playing into transphobic tropes long thought banished to the realms of hell where Buffalo Bill’s dress and Ace Ventura’s hair wax can be found.”
“It doesn’t stop there either. Throughout the film, Emilia Pérez is endlessly subjected to misgendering and deadnaming at every turn while even Emilia herself bizarrely refers to her body as “half he, half she” during a romantic number with another woman.”
“The worst moment however, worse even than the fate that eventually befalls Emilia, is the moment when our protagonist angrily throws his unsuspecting wife onto a bed and threatens her using the same low, masculine voice she used pre-surgery. It’s as if the so-called “evil” in Emilia is a separate entity, the “man” she was raised to be, rather than her being the same person going through a transitional journey.”
Musical crime thriller Emilia Perez is a shallow and soulless endeavour by Sarah-Tai Black
“In terms of the character we see in Emilia Pérez, Audiard’s vision is undoubtedly a step backward for the representation of trans women in cinema, which historically has already been, in a word, abysmal.”
“After reuniting with Jessi and her children under the guise of being a distant cousin of Manitas’s (yes, a la Chris Columbus’s 1993 film Mrs. Doubtfire), Emilia struggles with reconciling her and Jessi’s past relationship with their irrevocably changed present context, “reverting” to violence and manipulative shows of power when faced with the mounting pressures of her current reality. This would be alright if these kinds of harms weren’t deeply coded as a “regression” on Emilia’s part to her previous “male” self; notably, actress Gascón lowers her voice several registers in such scenes and, later on in the film, has her perfectly manicured fingers – previously a crucial component of her character’s feminine visual syntax, alongside sleekly elegant costuming undertaken by Anthony Vaccarello of Yves Saint Laurent – cut off by kidnappers.”
“It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense.”
Emilia Pérez Is a Disaster From Start to Finish by Douglas Markowitz
“It’s appropriate that Emilia Pérez, French film director Jacques Audiard’s movie musical about a transgender cartel boss, should begin with a kidnapping because for the entirety of its interminable 132-minute runtime, I felt as if I was the one being held hostage. It is not simply the worst film of the year; it is a vicious insult, not only to trans people but to the entire nation of Mexico.”
“Speaking of which, the character of Emilia also becomes a major issue for the film, which makes constant inquiries into whether she is genuinely a new woman. Early in the movie, she convinces the shady Israeli doctor (Mark Ivanir) hired by Rita to complete the surgery that she has always been hiding her true gender identity as a survival mechanism, yet as soon as she brings her family home, she begins to question it. After learning of Jessi’s affair, Emilia switches back to Manitas’ masculine vocal register to chastise and threaten her, as if the man is still inside her. One song sees her characterize herself as ‘half him, half her/half papa, half tía.'”
“I am a straight, cisgender man, and I cannot claim to understand the trans experience fully. (Although, to be sure, trans critics such as my New Times colleague Juan Barquin have also criticized the film.) But none of the transgender people in my life would ever question whether or not they are the gender they claim to be. Yet Emilia constantly backtracks on her chosen identity. The film seems to believe its title character is some confused, perverted man. It traffics in the same tired and dangerous stereotypes that have been ascribed to trans people for generations.”
The Oscar hype for Emilia Pérez is baffling, and the trans community deserves better by Peter Knegt
“Many are predicting Emilia Pérez will get a slew of nominations, including one for Gascón, who would become the first openly trans actor of any gender to be nominated for an Academy Award, which would obviously be a really big deal. But we need the largely (read almost entirely) cisgender voting bodies of awards season to tread carefully when embracing this narrative — not because of Gascón (who is fine in the film), but because Emilia Pérez is a messy, insensitive, often baffling movie that does not seem to understand (or even care to understand) its titular trans character. And I promise you that going all in on it this awards season will age about as well as Green Book winning best picture.”
(Updated 11/15/24, 8:10pm)