Say what you will about Emilia P├йrez, there’s one thing the genre-defying Mexican gender-transition-crime-musical-drama has done┬аwell: Wow awards voters.
After a stellar performance at the Golden Globes, taking home best movie-musical for its stars and writer-director Jacque Audiard, the Netflix flick did something of a repeat performance with the Academy. In the short list announced Thursday, Emilia P├йrez pulled in a record-shattering 13 nominations, going up for everything from best actress for its star, to best picture.┬а
Not only does that make it the nominations leader heading into the March 2 ceremony, it’s now the most nominated foreign picture at the Oscars, ever.┬а
So for such a big success, why does Emilia P├йrez have critics calling it everything from inauthentic┬аto transphobic and racist?
“It’s incredible because somehow the film has united Mexico тАФ everyone hates it,” explained Mexican film critic Ricardo Gallegos Ramos. “Everyone [in Mexico] is inviting you to not go to the movie theatre: Please, don’t support this movie.”
WATCH | Emilia P├йrez trailer:┬а
The story itself follows the titular Emilia P├йrez before and after transitioning: beginning the film as Mexico’s most powerful cartel boss, P├йrez bribes a lawyer into facilitating a sex change operation┬аand identity swap. The lawyer, played by Zoe Salda├▒a, fakes P├йrez’s death to both the world and P├йrez’s own family, allowing P├йrez to leave her old life completely behind.┬а
But missing her wife (played by Selena Gomez) and children, P├йrez formulates a plot. Posing as her own estranged sister, she invites them to live in her sprawling mansion. At the same time, P├йrez tries to make amends for her criminal past by starting a charity organization; enlisting the help of former narcos, they locate cartel victims’ remains and return them to their grieving families.┬а
It’s a far-ranging plot тАФ one that this reviewer felt was too scattered to hold together. But Gallegos Ramos says what’s worse is how Emilia P├йrez was made, and by whom.┬а
Audiard is not Mexican, while the movie was filmed on a French soundstage instead of in Mexico. Also, only one of the film’s major actors, Adriana Paz, is Mexican. It’s led to a groundswell of indignation from the country: Gallegos Ramos is not alone in claiming the film utilizes “unintelligibly” poor Mexican accents, an offensively shallow exploitation of cartel crimes for entertainment and a shortsighted and stereotypical depiction of Mexican society.┬а
For his part, Audiard has both apologized for, and defended the film.┬а
“Maybe it will even seem to you that I am just flying over this issue. And if it seems to you that I am doing it too lightly, I offer you an apology,” he said in French at a Jan. 15 press conference in Mexico.┬а
“Maybe this film can at least raise some questions, and maybe these questions can raise conversations and discussions. And if that happens, that will make me happy.”
The discussions it raises go beyond its depiction of Mexico.
“It’s a shallow and soulless outing that has no faith in the intelligence of its audience, squanders the considerable skills of its lead actresses, and, in its shallow and inert politics, is pathologically audacious in the worst sense,” wrote the Globe & Mail’s Sarah-Tai Black. “Which is all to say: it will probably win an Oscar.”
Meanwhile, others have stepped up to defend the film тАФ James Cameron called it a “beautiful piece of filmmaking,” while Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro told Audiard after watching that “it’s so beautiful to see a movie that is cinema.”
‘Mezcal and guacamole’
But Gallegos Ramos said the cartoonish, stereotypical depiction of Mexico and Mexicans supercedes industry validation. He pointed specifically to one song, El Mal, in which P├йrez’s young son sings about her, as indicative of how Emilia P├йrez is “for foreigners” more so than Mexicans.
“You smell like spicy food, spicy spicy,” the boy sings. “Mezcal and guacamole.”
“The fact that the industry, James Cameron sees this and doesn’t say, ‘Hmm, this isn’t right,'” Gallegos Ramos said,┬а“like, this is some Speedy Gonzalez-level racism going on in this movie.”
The film’s supporters often point to its genre-bending style and the personal story at Emilia P├йrez‘s heart as its draw. Teri Hart, a film critic from Toronto, saw Emilia P├йrez at the Toronto International Film Festival, hailed it as her favourite movie of the festival.
“I’m so reticent to even say what it is now for anybody who hasn’t seen it, because the joy for me was that first seven minutes and going, ‘What am I watching?'” she said. “It truly was one of the most refreshing movie experiences I’ve had in a long time.”
Beyond that experience though, is what Emilia P├йrez represents, she said. Star Karla Sof├нa Gasc├│n is herself transgender, and now the first openly transgender person to be nominated for an Oscar. But despite its barnstorming performance at major awards shows, Emilia P├йrez was completely shut out of nominations by the GLAAD Awards honouring LGBTQ representation in media, and the subject of an essay by the organisation asking audiences to avoid the film.
While Hart pointed out there are both Mexican and queer critics who have come out in defence of the film, she noted the pushback and conversations around it as necessary.
“When something is that talked about, there’s going to be negative as well as positive. And I think that that’s all part of the conversation,” she said. “Everybody’s point of view is really important here.”
Black had a very different experience after seeing the film.
“It was quite тАФ I don’t want to say shocking because I don’t even want to give it that credit. It wasn’t shocking. I was just truly aghast,” they said.
Black, who is non-binary, pointed to the way P├йrez is depicted as particularly negative. The film is overwhelmingly obsessed with her medical transition тАФ one possible element of a transgender person’s journey but, Black said, neither necessary nor the most important part.┬а
Emilia P├йrez, they said in an interview with CBC, almost perversely centres physical change тАФ managing to be both carnivalesque in how it presents the most private aspects of a transgender person’s body, while being wholly incurious about their inner lives.┬а
They pointed to one egregious song: “Man to woman, or woman to man?” P├йrez’s doctor sings. After being told it’s the former, he responds in a deep, drawn-out, comedic note: “Penis to vagina.”┬а
‘A slap in the face’
Emilia P├йrez┬аalso bases itself around the threat of P├йrez’s “inherent maleness” coming back out to threaten her family and society at large, Black said. It’s an unfortunate and offensive stereotype, they said, especially when other works by trans creators like The People‘s Joker, I Saw the TV Glow and Netflix’s Will & Harper all premiered this year to lesser attention.┬а
“It’s such a slap in the face to see Emilia P├йrez dominate the conversation when it just does not care. It does not care about trans people,” they said.
As a Black critic, it’s a storyline they said they’ve seen in the past: films like Crash and Green Book and The Help all earned best picture nominations and wins, they said, through shallowly uplifting depictions of marginalized groups. They see Emilia P├йrez as just another such example.┬а
“The thing is films like this тАФ films that are so harmful to the communities they’re purportedly lifting up тАФ do widen the conversation, and they do increase awareness to people who otherwise wouldn’t make the effort to know,” they said. “But it does come at the expense of those communities. And it is exhausting.”
