Last December, my partner and I attempted to build one of those nice gingerbread house kits that are sold everywhere during the holidays. It was an ill-fated venture. The more icing we applied to mortar the whole structure into cohesion, the more fragile it became, pitilessly collapsing in on itself again and again, until at last our efforts boiled over into a free-for-all of gumdrops, wafers, glaze and candy buttons, the whole thing rising into what might charitably be called a cubist ziggurat.
I bring this up because watching French director Jacques Audiard’s new movie, Emilia Pérez, which lands on Netflix tomorrow after a small theatrical run, I was reminded of the attempted gingerbread house, and the increasingly febrile energy that went into its construction. This is a movie about a Mexican drug cartel kingpin who enlists an unappreciated Black lawyer to bring about the sex change he’s wanted all his life. It’s also a movie about the massive violence committed against Mexican women, both by drug lords and by their own husbands. In addition, it’s about womanhood in all its forms. It’s also about trying to outrun your past, culture shock, love, jealousy and class divisions. Did I mention it’s also a musical?
Every time Emilia Pérez reaches a fork in the road, it doesn’t just pick a path; it says, “I’ll do both.” And, for the most part, it kind of works. The film does lag in the second half, and the film’s concluding scenes come as more of a relief than the catharsis that the film wants them to be. But in spite of all that, it has enough fun and ambition to carry it. How much can you really dislike a movie that includes a charmingly catchy song set in a hallucinogenic gender surgery clinic and centred around a refrain involving the word “vaginoplasty”?
To be clear, this is not a movie about trans people so much as one in which a “sex change” is a major plot point (and it says something about this film that I’m not even sure if it’s the major plot point). It all gets started when the lawyer Rita Moro Castro (Zoe Saldana), who’s easily 10 times smarter than her glory-grabbing boss, is whisked away for a meeting with drug lord Manitas
Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón, playing the character both pre- and post-transition). There, Manitas tells Rita that he wants her to manage his pursuit of gender-affirming surgery, popping out the boobs he’s managed to grow via estrogen therapy to prove his point. Manitas not only wants a new body, he wants an entirely new life, one that leaves behind the cartels, his wife and his two small children.
It’s never clear why Rita is the right person for the job, or why a person with inexhaustible resources even needs help to begin with, but if you even think of asking questions like this then you’re missing the point of this movie—it’s not so much about logic and plot, it’s much more driven on the level of sensory experience, intense emotion and cinematic frenzy. Anyway, Rita does an amazingly thorough job, finding an Israeli doctor to completely remake Manitas’s body, orchestrating a public, fiery death for him, shipping his family off to Switzerland with entirely new identities, and giving him a new life as the Mexican woman Emilia Pérez. After a not-so-chance meeting in London years later, Emilia convinces Rita to to help her build a new empire that the movie poses as the polar opposite of Manitas’s drug life—a massive non-profit organization that solves the unsolved disappearances created by the drug trade, and that advocates for the rights of women. The question, which the Israeli surgeon poses in a charming duet with Rita, is if you can really change your soul: is an entirely new life enough for Emilia to escape the life that brought her into this world?
Just so you know, as I offer this plot summary I am leaving out oh-so-many subplots and other bits and pieces, which, if I went into here, would end up turning this review into something of a gingerbread ziggurat. Just know they’re there—some of which complicate the film in interesting ways, others of which probably serve no other purpose than to furnish Audiard’s overwhelmingly maximalist aesthetic.
One of the interesting questions that comes up around Emilia Pérez is who gets to tell which stories. Emilia herself is thankfully played by a trans woman, in Gascón, who does an amazing job handling both the roles of Manitas and Emilia. (Her work here made her the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival, with all four lead actresses from the film sharing the festival’s top acting honour) However, two other leads are Americans—Saldaña as Rita and Selena Gomez as Emilia’s wife, Jessica—meaning that this is a movie centred around Mexico and its identity that is made by non-Mexicans. (While Adriana Paz, whose character Epifanía enters the film in its second half, is Mexican and split the Cannes prize with Gascon, Saldana and Gomez, her role is comparatively small.)
At a time when trans representation in film and TV is at an all-time high—and when Hollywood has mostly gotten the message that it’s not acceptable to cast cis actors in trans roles—one might reasonably ask where the line should be drawn. Is it okay for Gomez to deliver lines as a Mexican woman in what is very clearly not a Mexican accent? Does it change things that her character and her sibling, Julianne, have names that imply that they weren’t necessarily born in Mexico? Does it matter that Gascón moved to Mexico over a decade earlier and considers herself a Mexican?
In part, Emilia Pérez sidesteps such questions because it’s truly a postmodern spectacle, a venture that aspires more to a hyperreal plasticity than anything grounded in earthly realities. It comes across as more of a fable than anything else. But we might respond that maybe some things aren’t appropriate subjects for the playful machinations of French auteurs—should the deaths of thousands at the hands of drug cartels and the trans lives that are currently under assault all over the world be turned into exuberant parades of manic filmmaking?
The fact that we’re even asking such questions now is something of a statement. Camp, of course, was born as a queer genre, and when it first started going mainstream in the 1960s, it was the only way to tell queer stories for a mass audience. We had to clothe our serious narratives in the garb of the ridiculous because it was the only way. Because Emilia Pérez is clearly in this lineage, it gets a lot of room—from my own trans perspective, its campiness lets it get away with a lot of groan-inducing lines that I might want to call out other films for. But this brings up another question: what exactly does camp have to offer to the trans experience at this point? Films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or even Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 body horror film The Skin I Live In might be seen as having served some purpose via their ludicrous stories, but at this point aren’t we just better off telling our stories as ourselves? Or, to put it differently, does the queer community still need camp as much as it once did?
In her now-canonical essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag defined the genre for its “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration,” adding that it draws her in almost as strongly as it offends her, because it “converts the serious into the frivolous.” It is this conflict at the heart of camp that seduces her, the paradox that as campy films pursue seriousness all the harder, they become more ridiculous. At one point this “good taste of bad taste” that camp represented was liberatory, particularly for the gay men that Sontag identified as its “vanguard.” If there is still something liberatory about camp, I don’t think Emilia Pérez achieves it—as other critics have noted, the film’s mortal sin may be that of being dull.
Except, when it’s not dull, it’s a lot of fun. I appreciate Emilia Pérez for raising all of these interesting questions (possibly, it must be said, in spite of itself), just like I appreciate it for its amazingly high-quality filmmaking and its rousing, legitimately enjoyable musical numbers. I’m just not sure that it’s as interested in trans or Mexican lives as much as it is in the nuts and bolts and filmmaking and composing a great score. It’s film for film’s sake, which may or may not be enough.
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