Pain.
Pure, unadulterated pain. Sometimes there is a film out there that leaves you with this feeling of absolute misery. “Emilia Pérez,” which won Best Actress (being awarded collectively to its female ensemble cast) and the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, is the latest example.
“Emilia Pérez” follows Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer who is hired by the leader of a cartel (Karla Sofía Gascón), who requires Rita’s assistance in transitioning into a woman — offering a large sum of money in order for the procedure to happen. The film’s second half focuses on the reinvention of Emilia Pérez, going from a cartel head to a human rights activist.
Jacques Audiard, the director and writer of the film (who was also previously awarded the Palme d’Or back at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for “Dheepan”), delivers a disgraceful depiction of Mexico. He relies on stereotypes (such as the depiction of the cartels, and to a further extent, trying to make the viewer sympathetic to Emilia, especially considering the brutality that occured under her reign as a cartel head) with one example being during the musical number Todo y Nada, with the backing singers being portrayed as cleaning workers — the optics of which are deeply troubling, especially considering that Audiard is French. This depiction of the country extends to the characters’ accents, which happen to be Spanish rather than the Mexican dialect and accent which should have been utilized, with the line delivery of Selena Gomez’s character being an example of this. These aspects just show Audiard’s blatant disregard for any sort of research into the country and capturing any kind of accurate representation.
“Emilia Pérez” fails to even work as a basic musical, with the musical numbers featuring off-key vocals, as if they were done in one take with absolutely no vocal training — or in a few cases conflicting with the tempo of the instrumentation itself, resulting in a bizarre mish-mash that’s difficult to listen to with one number sung by Jessi Del Monte ((Karla Sofía Gascón) in the second act, being a prominent example of this failure.
Most infamously, the number La Vaginoplastia, featured in the first act, contains incredibly awkward lyrics and vocal deliveries that left me audibly exclaiming “What?!” in pure bewilderment — with bizarrely delivered and poorly written lyrics such as “Hello, very nice to meet you! I’d like to know about sex-change operation” and “From penis to vagina,” being the most infamous examples of this. It comes off as trivializing an important medical procedure that many trans people undergo to live happily as their true selves. Another one of the most egregious offenders of this is the number Lady, featured not too long after La Vaginoplastia, with this sequence featuring Rita with Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir) discussing Emilia, with the singing being atrocious (especially that of Ivanir’s, being so off-key that it sounds like nails on a chalkboard) which makes sitting through this disgrace to celluloid an even more grueling endurance test.
My gripes with the film extend to the technical aspects of the film, specifically the editing. Throughout the film (especially in the second half) there is a heavy overreliance on weirdly placed fade-outs and abrupt cuts to a new scene after the fade-out. The film’s pacing also makes it feel like a chore to get through, with specific sequences, especially in the second half, dragging ever so slowly.
“Emilia Pérez” delivers to the viewer a downright dreadful and awful viewing experience — with the thirteen Oscar nominations and the numerous other accolades that it has received this season truly baffling to witness, and almost certainly certifies it as the “Crash” of this generation.
“Emilia Pérez” is available for streaming on Netflix.
