I always try to end up watching the major nominees from the Oscars each year, including every Best Picture nominee. Judging by inside reporting, that appears to be more than what many Academy members do.
As such, I knew I had to eventually watch Emilia Pérez, the Netflix feature which has landed a record 13 nomination for a foreign film and is tied with last year’s Best Picture winner Oppenheimer with that total. The film has created a wide disparity between industry figures and awards show voters, critics, and general audiences.
Clearly voters think it’s stellar, lauding it with praise and dozens of nominations, and now it appears to be an Oscar favorite for at least a number of categories. Critics were a little less enthused, and if Emilia Pérez won Best Picture, it would be the lowest critic-scored movie to do so since Crash. Audiences are…far harsher, as it currently has a dismal 25% audience score and has had many clips go viral, becoming nothing short of a meme in many circles, especially Film Twitter.
But I did not want to judge it until I had seen it myself, and now after doing so…no, I am not sure what these voters are thinking. Emilia Pérez is not a good movie. Not a good crime drama, not a good musical and by all accounts, not a good representation of the groups it focuses on, namely Mexicans and trans people. And that is also according to many Mexicans and trans people.
The film stars Zoe Saldana as Rita, a lawyer forcible recruited by a crime boss, Manitas, played by Karla Sofía Gascón, who wants to undergo gender-confirming surgery to become a woman. She emerges as Emilia Pérez, but will not give up a connection to her wife, Jessi, played by Selena Gomez, and her children.
One issue with the film is that Pérez’s transformation, though rooted in a genuine desire to change, is often played off like a disguise, used almost entirely to “hide” from her wife while still having a relationship with her children in a storyline that is genuinely, weirdly similar to Mrs. Doubtfire.
Pérez is also meant to be some sort of local saint, locating cartel-killed corpses for their families. But as a character she’s just…completely unsympathetic. She jerks her family around, banishing them to Switzerland, then yanking them back home under the guise of further protection when she really just wants a covert, again “disguised,” relationship with her children. When understandably Jessi wants to move on, get remarried and form a new family unit, Emilia erupts with vengeance, freezing her money and demanding her children stay, which would understandably freak out Jessi.
Saldana’s character originally appears like the star, then is mostly sidelined as she becomes sidekick and observer to Emilia’s story. She does have a great musical dance number at a gala that may genuinely be the only good part of the film.
But the rest of this movie being a musical? It comes off as bizarre. There are obviously many incredibly musicals out there and many Oscar-worthy, but every time the film breaks into song, its jarring, and many “songs” are mostly just characters singing their lines for twenty seconds or so.
The film feels inauthentic, and one common complaint is that it’s a story about a Mexican family set mostly in Mexico that was directed and written by French people and filmed entirely on a soundstage in Paris. It feels like it wants to broadcast a progressive message, but ultimately comes off like a parody of one much of the time, and I understand how it often offends the groups it claims to want to elevate.
I can understand maybe a few nominations here. Perhaps Saldana, perhaps star Karla Sofía Gascón who is making history as the first trans nominee for Best Actress, which is heartening to see. But this film as a whole does not work at all and is a genuine struggle to get through. It’s impossible to recommend to any fans of the individual genres it tries to operate within, and if you are making your way through the Best Picture nominee list, it’s one I would recommend skipping entirely.
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