Even though I don’t keep up with awards season or the film industry, I couldn’t escape the flurry of controversy that followed this year’s Oscars, Golden Globes, and even SAG (US actors’ union) awards. It was all over one movie- Emilia Perez, which has received rave critic reviews and won awards, but bombed spectacularly with the general public. As of early April, it has a 72% critic score and 16% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a stark difference.
Emilia Perez tells the story of a Mexican drug cartel boss who seeks to transition into a woman to escape his crime-ridden life. The director is Frenchman Jacques Audiard, who decided to shoot the Mexican parts of the story in Paris, France, and told the press that he did not research Mexico’s culture, its drug cartels, or anything about the transgender community. It shows.
The major plot point of the first part of the movie is Emilia’s gender reassignment surgery, re-imagined by Audiard as some sort of all-encompassing mega-procedure. Emilia’s lawyer travels to Turkey to consult with an Israeli doctor, who pitches her a range of surgeries for Emilia, all of which Emilia’s lawyer said yes to. The doctor sells Emilia’s lawyer on a range of surgeries, including a nose job, and calls all of them collectively “gender reassignment surgery.” The result of this is one comical omni-surgery, where Emilia wakes up with her whole face and body bandaged. I burst out laughing the first time I saw this scene; it looked like a parody.

Audidard may have dropped the ball on making a trans film, but he wasn’t any better at handling Emilia Perez’s Mexican setting. Most of the movie’s dialogue is in Spanish, which I assume would present a challenge for a non Spanish-speaking director. Mexican film critics prove my assumption right; the Spanish in Emilia Perez is apparently often laughably bad. Emilia’s actress is from Spain, her wife is played by Selena Gomez, an American non-fluent speaker, and her lawyer’s actress is Dominican. None of them have a Mexican accent, and none of them particularly worked on one. I personally have up to a Spanish 3 education and never particularly excelled in that class, but I was able to pick up the plot and key bits of dialogue with very minimal guesswork.
Besides all the glaring story and demographic issues, Emilia Perez is so incompetently and artlessly made that even I, a notable movie non-watcher, noticed all the technical flaws. The director seems to know exactly three angles, and uses them to film every scene, whether it takes place in a crowded city street or a dimly lit trailer, giving the whole movie no sense of space. Nothing about Emilia Perez’s visuals is beautiful to look at, or unsettlingly raw, or compelling at all.
The musical numbers have been compared to those in Joker 2; they start off with a halfhearted call-and-response schtick or mumble-singing that might be meant to come off as vulnerable, but just sounds bad. All this happens over bland, half-hearted instrumentals that make a vague gesture at Latin music without committing to the genre. Then, the song dies out after thirty seconds without any sonic or emotional progression. Multiple times, I wasn’t sure exactly when they even ended. More often than not, the dancing was middle-school-musical quality, if any existed at all.
Between the incompetent, borderline goofy dance numbers, the gritty cartel storyline, and the attempts at an inspirational storyline, you may be asking yourself what the general tone of this movie is even supposed to be. Well, I don’t know, and Emilia Perez doesn’t either. It tries to be funny and over-the-top in one scene, and scary and realistic in the next, without any clear rhyme or reason as to when the many tone shifts happen.
I have very few positive things to say about Emilia Perez, but I do have a few. One musical number out of the soundtrack was actually pretty decent. It started out with a scene of community members who had lost someone to gang violence lining up at a charity Emilia founded, pans over to Emilia and her lawyer doing the humanitarian work, and culminates in a chorus that loosely translates to “hear our voices.” Never mind that Emilia’s charity does not atone for any of her past misdeeds. The second good thing I have to say about Emilia Perez is that it’s a very fun hate watch. There’s a technical mistake, sketchy plot point, or tonally confusing moment every thirty seconds, and the plot is so convoluted it doesn’t actually matter if you stop paying attention. It’s a great movie to throw on and make fun of. It might be frustrating if you’re Mexican, or transgender, or big into musicals, but it is my personal opinion that Emilia Perez will join The Room in the canon of iconically bad works of art.