Emilia Pérez wants a perfect body, she wants a perfect soul

Nearly six months after it premiered at Cannes—where it was awarded the Jury Prize and Best Actress for its central ensemble—Emilia Pérez will surely continue to fuel divisive discourse upon its Netflix streaming premiere. French director Jacques Audiard steps far outside of his personal purview to tell the predominantly Spanish-language tale of a feared Mexican cartel boss who secretly undergoes extensive gender-affirming surgery to become a woman. If the plot itself wasn’t daring enough, the film’s regular musical numbers cement its audaciously melodramatic leanings, executed with wholehearted commitment (and varying results) by its woman-led cast. Though its thematic threads are never woven into salient social commentary, there is a perverse pleasure to be had with Emilia Pérez, even if its positions on gender, sexuality, and broader Mexican society lack proper nuance. 

Emilia Pérez opens with listless lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) musing—via song and dance, of course—about the innate corruption of her role within Mexico’s patriarchal judicial system. When a shady offer arrives via a cryptic phone call, Rita figures that she has nothing to lose by simply fielding it, particularly because it promises an immense payout. This brings her face to face with Manitas Del Monte (standout Karla Sofía Gascón), a ruthless drug lord with the body count to back up his notorious reputation. Manitas gruffly explains to Rita that she’s been scouted to research, and eventually hire, the best surgeon possible for a gender reassignment operation. Once she agrees to the terms, she flies across the world to meet with top doctors and tour their facilities (set to a Busby Berkeley-esque showtune about vaginoplasty) that will help Manitas transition to Emilia Pérez. 

But before this transformation can take place, Manitas’ wrath must claim one more life: his own. Staging this death is easy enough, but relocating Manitas’ grieving widow Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two young children proves the biggest hurdle to Emilia’s emancipation. Though the cartel leader had been undergoing hormone therapy for two years before hiring Rita, the family was seemingly never aware of the patriarch’s gender dysphoria. After Rita escorts the bereaving family to their new estate in Switzerland—far from potential rival gang members who hope to enact revenge now that Manitas cannot protect them—she is told by Emilia that her contract has been fulfilled, and the copious wealth she was promised is now hers to enjoy. 

Years later, Emilia reappears in Rita’s now lavish life, now soliciting her aid in returning her family to Mexico so they can be reunited. She desperately misses her children, a sentimental revelation that heralds a drastic change in the former narcotraficante’s moral compass. To atone for her previous crimes—and, by proxy, emulate an idealized version of righteous womanhood—she co-founds an NGO with Rita that aims to bring justice to the family of missing and murdered civilians who were targets of cartel brutality. Now back in the public eye, Emilia is solely recognized as an agent of justice, but truly changing her previous proximity to violence won’t come as naturally as assuming her rightful identity. 

“Changing the body changes society,” Rita emphatically sings earlier in Emilia Pérez. At the time, she is pleading Emilia’s case to a prospective Israeli surgeon (Cyrus Khodaveisi), who warns that physical alteration does not equate to a genuine change in personality. While Rita’s point is true to an extent—that facilitating access to gender-affirming care will expand civil rights for marginalized people—there is some merit to the doctor’s thought. Although Emilia’s organization, La Lucecitia (the little light), attempts to rectify her role in mass disappearances and killings, it also brings her into the fold of the Mexican elite, who continue to perpetrate violence of their own. This is brought full-circle during a benefit dinner for the organization, wherein Rita performs a garish rap-rock number that highlights the attendee’s unscrupulous nature, many of whom are sleazy clients that the former lawyer defended in court. Even if the intentions of La Lucecita are honorable, the bulk of its funding is provided by amoral aristocrats. 

Audiard’s thesis is that living a personally authentic life does not necessarily absolve us from the privilege we may possess. The filmmaker’s position portrays embracing one’s trans identity as a frivolous pursuit compared to other social justice issues. Emilia is suffused with derogatory trans tropes—she abandoned her family, sings about being “half he, half she,” and is barrelling toward tragedy—but at least Gascón enlivens an otherwise underdeveloped character. The Spanish soap actress is so compelling that one almost forgets about all of the loose threads that are all but abandoned: Why couldn’t the same doctor that facilitated Emilia’s hormone therapy be trusted to refer a surgeon? Does her child’s remark about Emilia smelling like Manitas not make her worried about Jessi eventually catching on? How does Emilia’s budding relationship with the aptly named Epifanía (Adriana Paz in a minor yet strong role) impact her sexual identity? 

There are innumerable missteps in Emilia Pérez, from the unremarkable songs from songwriter Camille Dalmais and composer Clément Ducol to septuagenarian Frenchman Audiard’s palpable removal from a genuinely Mexican perspective. Of the main cast, only Paz is Mexican, and the film itself was shot on a soundstage in France, though the film’s stance on there being over 100,000 missing persons cases in Mexico is certainly true. Yet repeatedly emphasizing this injustice while only momentarily touching on the country’s rampant femicide and homo/transphobia feels egregiously narrow in focus. While Emilia Pérez doesn’t excel as a musical, social interrogation, or acting masterclass (Gomez, despite the Cannes award, is uninspired), it is still perplexingly transfixing. Its 132-minute runtime notwithstanding, Emilia Pérez manages to arrest and intrigue, if only because you truly don’t know what the frenetic narrative’s next move is (even its genre clunkily shifts between tense thriller, telenovela, and crime caper). If you don’t expect intelligence and embrace the spectacle, it’s not such a bad trip. 

Director: Jacques Audiard
Writer: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, Édgar Ramírez
Release Date: November 1, 2024; November 13, 2024 (Netflix)