“Emilia Pérez” is quickly becoming one of the favorites of the awards, accumulating four Golden Globe and 13 Oscar nominations, in addition to SAG awards nominations.
The wide musical opera in Spanish defies an easy categorization, as the star Karla Sofía Gascón acknowledged in an interview for the Netflix Tudum blog in January.
“You have an action movie that is not an action movie, a drama that is not a drama, a comedy that is not a comedy,” he said.
Gascón plays two roles in the raw film: first, Juan “Manitas” del Monte, a leader of a Mexican gang who dreams of living openly as a woman.
The cartel capo recruits a lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), to help her pretend her own death and obtain in secret gender statement attention, and finally her new and authentic me, Emilia Pérez, was born.
However, Emilia cannot completely escape her violent origins, and when her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), returns to the scene, the past and the present collide tragically.
Some critics and filmmakers have praised the Spanish musical of the French director Jacques Audiard; Variety described the “dazzling” film and his colleague director Michael Mann described her as “contemporary masterpiece.”
However, many spectators have criticized Netflix film for their lack of cultural authenticity and transgender representation.
Transgender representation
The LGBTQ Glaad media defense group, in a scathing criticism on its website, described the film as a “deeply retrograde portrait of a trans woman” and a “step back for trans representation.”
“‘Emilia Pérez’ recycles the stereotypes, tropes and trans clichés of a not very distant past,” says the November post.
Some critics argue that the film perpetuates harmful transition stereotypes and the narrative that the transition is a form of deception.
“The transition of its protagonist is considered misleading and dishonest, an act of manipulation through which he continues with his selfish attempts to control those who abandoned,” Mattie Lucas wrote in a November review for Trans | Condental Cinema. “His transition not only presents himself as a disguise to evade the authorities, but it is an act of continuous selfishness that ends up destroying not only his own life, but also the life of their loved ones.”
The film critic Juan Barquín described the film as “a regressive image disguised as progressive” and criticized the way masculinity and femininity in the film are portrayed.
“Every time Emilia ‘returns’ to his ‘old customs’, Gascón lowers his vocal record to match masculinity with evil and femininity with good,” Barquin wrote for Little White Lies magazine.
Several critics and spectators, including Barquin, also disagreed with a line of the film in which Emilia describes herself as “half man, half women.”
Some transgender commentators shared counterpoints and defended the representation of the movie of their protagonist Trans.
Trans journalist and criticism Mey Rude rejected the argument that Emilia use a “male voice” in moments of anger.
“She is simply a woman with a lower record, and when she gets angry, she shows,” Rude wrote in an article for Out magazine.
Rude also argues that the film is not based on “Trans troops harmful to trans women who are misleading or liars.”
“Emilia is not a liar because she is trans, she is a liar because she is a bad person and, in many ways, she is afraid,” Rude wrote. “The film shows that if you live a lie, be trans or not, your lies will reach you.”
Trans writer Julie River, maintains in an article for the Out Front magazine that Emilia is portrayed with sensitivity as a “morally complex” character that makes “a desperate attempt to atone for his sins in her previous life.”
River also argues that Emilia hides his transition not because the film shows trans people as misleading, but because, as the leader of a poster, Emilia “was hardly surrounded by people with whom it was easy to leave the closet or who would probably accept their transition “
River added: “It may be among the minority of the LGBTQ+ community that does this, but I will applaud it for each prize that wins.”
Gascón herself has responded to the people who call her character of “Emilia Pérez” transbic.
“There are some who say, ‘I want to see LGBTQ or trans characters overcoming what people do in real life’, but we also do bad things … I do not understand the criticism of the representation of portraying Emilia Pérez in this way. ”He told Vanity Fair in January. “The reality is that the trans experience is not the same for everyone; my trans experience is different from that of any other person.”
“If you don’t like it, go and make your own movie,” Gascón also said. “You will create the representation you want to see for your community.”
Cultural authenticity
Some have questioned why the film was not filmed in Mexico, despite being set there, and why it does not present Mexican protagonists. According to Hollywood Reporter, most of the film was filmed in a sound stage in Paris, except for five days of exterior shots in Mexico.
Others have criticized Gomez’s linguistic skills, which does not speak Spanish fluently, and have questioned why the film was directed by Audiard, which is French and, as confirmed to The New York Times, does not speak Spanish.
Audiard also faced criticism after revealing that he did not investigate much about Mexico while making the film.
“How much did you have to study Mexico to make this movie?” An interviewer asked in a clip that circulates on social networks.
“I didn’t study much,” says Audiard through a translator, according to a translation of NBC News. “What I had to understand, I knew,” he says in French.
“Emilia Pérez” won four Golden Globes on January 5, including two awards for Best Film in the Musical/Comedy and Non -English Language categories, which generated online controversy.
“A Frenchman, who does not speak Spanish or English, wins the France prize for a Spanish film, based on Mexico but filmed in France, about a leader of a Mexican poster,” wrote the Mexican-American journalist Tomás Mier in X day after the Golden Globes.
Mexican actor and singer Mauricio Martínez also criticized the lack of investigation that Audiard admitted to Mexico for the film, and criticized the film in an X post for “portraying a Mexico full of stereotypes, ignorance (y) lack of respect.”
The film criticism Ana Iribe also criticized the lack of investigation of the film and the way in which violence in Mexico portrays.
“It is the lack of information that makes it insensitive: we do not want a white French director to portray the violence that we have to face every day,” he wrote in X. “I do not oppose foreign artists to make films about other countries, always And when they have good investigation, and Emilia Pérez didn’t have that. ”
While “Emilia Pérez” develops in Mexico, the protagonists of the film are not from Mexico.
Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, is from Spain; Zoe Saldaña, who plays Rita, is American with Dominican and Puerto Rican ancestry; And Selena Gomez is from the United States with Mexican and Italian heritage.
In a remarkable exception, the secondary member of the cast Adriana Paz, who plays Emilia’s lover, Epiphany, is from Mexico.
Paz defended the film in an interview with Indiewire.
“I have heard people say that it is offensive to Mexico. I really want to know why, because I didn’t feel that way. And I have questioned some people I trust, not only as artists but as people, and they don’t feel like that, so I’m trying to understand, ”said Paz, adding that he feels that the director of the film is a“ genius ” . “
In November, casting director Carla Hool said during a SAG-AFTRA panel that she and her team “did a great search” of actors in Mexico, the United States, Spain and “all of Latin America”, but did not find any Mexican actor suitable for the main roles.
“We wanted it to be really authentic, but at the end of the day, the best actors who embodied these characters are the ones here,” he said, pointing to Gascón, Gómez and Saldaña on the panel next to her. “So we had to discover how to adjust authenticity … with accents, and not necessarily be Mexican natives.”
This article originally appeared on Today.com.
