Come Mierda, Puta! — Emilia Pérez

William J Hammon
17 min readJan 23, 2025

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As the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations grew ever closer, I knew there was still one major contender I hadn’t yet covered. Now, on the eve of the annual Blitz, it’s time to dust it off at long last. Debuting at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won a Jury Prize and an odd collective Best Actress award for its entire female-led ensemble, Emilia Pérez immediately generated buzz. A hybrid of a crime drama and a musical, a French film by a French director (Jacques Audiard, who helmed the Oscar-nominated A Prophet and previous Palme d’Or winner Dheepan) yet set in Mexico and starring Spanish and American performers, and a tale about sincerity bathed in shameless Awards Season marketing, the picture is a 130-minute contradiction. For all its hardware, it’s also received a vehement backlash from critics and audiences alike, to the point where it stands at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes (and 70% with the public), making it the second-lowest-rated of the 15 semifinalists for International Feature (the upcoming Armand has 74% from its festival run). Yet somehow, not only did it run roughshod over the Golden Globes earlier this month, it stands poised to garner a glut of nods come tomorrow morning, making it a legitimate Best Picture threat, the biggest hope Netflix has had for the top prize since Roma.

I made a point not to read anything about the movie until I could see it for myself, but that statistic troubled me. How does a movie scored so relatively low clean up so much? What is it about the film that got so many big name celebrities behind it, but so few fans? It’s one thing for the aggregate to get skewed on foreign films — at least from a critical standpoint — simply because so few are accessible to those without strong connections in entertainment media. That might explain a gap between this and, say, Vermiglio, which has only just come out stateside. But that doesn’t explain why nearly a third of customers hate it. Still, I did my best not to spoil anything for myself. I knew it was a musical. I knew it had Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, and a fair amount of English dialogue (so much so that by the halfway point I began to wonder if this was technically even eligible; China’s submission, the documentary The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru was disqualified for having over 50% English speech). I knew that transgender issues would play a major part. Maybe that tanked the audience numbers, a bit of review-bombing from bigots. It wouldn’t be the first time. Apart from that, though, I basically went in blind, cautious about the vitriol and hoping to be dazzled.

I now know why so many despise it. It’s pure unadulterated garbage. Dealing almost exclusively in outdated stereotypes, filled to capacity with awful production values, laden with bad acting and horrible music, and missing the point so thoroughly that other topical issues get nicked by stray bullets of ignorance as collateral damage, Emilia Pérez is nothing more than bait for voters looking for a “cause” to get behind. This is not some revolutionary form of empathetic storytelling. It’s performative progressivism parading itself as profundity, prancing and prattling on while patronizing to plebeians and pretending to be proud, a pointless provocation done at the peril of actual people being persecuted and pigeonholed due to this project’s putrid pastiche of pandering. There, I just gave you better wordplay in one paragraph than anything on the screen. This piece of shit acts like it’s striking a blow for representation, but in reality it’s just a gross amalgam of strawmen for hatemongers, as if Audiard just decided to make the movie he thought would piss off MAGA morons the most.

You realize that something is off the moment the film starts, when Rita (Saldaña), a lawyer in Mexico City, gets a call from her boss as she’s writing the opening argument for a trial, where her high-profile client is accused of murdering his wife, but the team decides on a defense that the woman committed suicide. As she pores over her notes with eyes more dead than the corpse at the center of the trial, she somehow breaks into song, moaning about how much it sucks to work for corrupt and powerful men. None of the shot selection makes any sense, nor does the choreography. Saldaña sings completely monotone and expresses no emotion whatsoever. At first I thought this was just the motif of the song, but no, she maintains that apathetic face for a full quarter of the movie, only eventually showing a reaction with an emphatic, almost orgasmic “YES! YES! YES!” when told about Adam’s Apple reduction by a plastic surgeon. This just feels wrong. Zoe Saldaña is a tremendous actress, able to convey mood and passion even when in a goddamn motion capture suit. What the hell is going on here?

When the apparently ludicrous defense succeeds, Rita is kidnapped and taken to the middle of the desert. She’s not going to be killed, though. Instead, the leader of a powerful drug cartel, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, offers to make her rich beyond her wildest dreams if she helps him procure the one thing he wants in this world under the strictest of secrecy. He wants to have gender reassignment surgery to become a woman. After stops in Bangkok and Tel Aviv, Rita is able to procure the services of one Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), even though he’s quite skeptical. In a rare moment of reason, Wasserman points out that just because the body changes, it doesn’t mean the mind changes with it, to which Rita replies in song, “You change the body, you change society.”

I’m sorry, what?! Now it becomes clear why this film has such vocal opposition. It’s quite apparent that Audiard, who also wrote the script and co-wrote the songs, has never met a transgender person before making this dreck. Manitas has apparently been taking hormone replacement therapy for two years, and in a single private (and off screen) discussion with Wasserman, gave the standard “I’ve always felt I was a woman” speech that somehow convinces him to do the surgery. I’ve met several trans individuals in my life, some who’ve had affirming procedures and others who haven’t, and obviously no group of people is a monolith, but I think I can comfortably say that it doesn’t work that way.

I’ll take for example an old friend named Will, who is sadly no longer with us, having died in 2007. He and my sister were an item for several years, having met in college. It was a single-sex school, so at the time Will still presented as “Joy,” and he and my sister were a same-sex couple. I understood nothing about his life and his struggles, and I’m ashamed to admit that when my mother and I first saw him — while picking my sister up from an overnight visitation at the school before she enrolled — we made jokes about how much he looked like a stereotypical “butch” lesbian. As they spent more time together I of course got to know him better, and I learned about how involved such decisions can be. Even after he and my sister broke up, they still remained close, and we still remained friends, albeit at a remove since we were no longer directly involved in each other’s lives. Will had undergone HRT for nearly eight years before he passed (brain aneurism in his sleep; at least he went fairly peacefully), and his biggest frustration was that he couldn’t get surgery, because his psychiatrists wouldn’t sign off on it. He was in a program that combined HRT with mental health guidance, and every professional agreed that he was unstable, not because of his gender identity, but because of a lifetime of pent up trauma from his ultra-conservative upbringing, and a side effect of the drugs was that he was prone to lash out unpredictably. Essentially, trained professionals who wanted to help him live as himself said he wouldn’t be able to handle it.

This knowledge is but a fraction of the lived experience he had in his short time on this planet, and I’m sure there are insights that I’ll never fully grasp no matter how hard I try. But in knowing him, in seeing him as a person rather than a talking point, I learned to commit to keep trying to understand. I can tell just from these first two meetings with Manitas where he grumbles his dialogue like a frog with strep throat that Audiard hasn’t even had that much of a personal connection with someone going through this. My sister lost someone very close to her (and I watched from afar, learning details mostly secondhand) who spent half his life trying to achieve even a smidgen of peace of mind and a calm soul by being who he really was. Meanwhile, here’s a drug lord saying, “I want to be a lady. Help me do it, and I’ll make you rich,” and that’s supposed to be compelling? Get the fuck out of here! No wonder GLAAD itself came out against this nonsense.

Also having Audiard on its shit list is Mexico itself. Despite the film being set there, it was shot mostly on French soundstages. There are almost no Mexican actors or crewmembers, either. But most importantly, the film’s portrayal of our neighbors to the south is far from friendly. To believe this version of the country is to buy into the very harmful assumptions that Mexico is nothing but corrupt, money-grubbing politicians and murderous gangsters. Further, while I’m most certainly not a Spanish-speaker, Mexican natives have pointed out that many of the songs don’t properly use the local dialect, opting more for grammar and syntax from Spain (part of the larger “Eurocentric” criticism the picture has faced), only inserting some Mexican slang into the lyrics in awkward places, creating its own equivalent of the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. Audiard himself admits he basically did no research on Mexico while making this, and even without speaking the language, you can tell. Nothing in this presentation would disabuse you of the perception that he just finds the whole country grimy and filthy.

Anyway, Rita does her job, and Manitas is reborn as the titular Emilia Pérez, with both sides of the transition played by Spanish telenovela star and trans actress Karla Sofia Gascón. As part of the deal, Rita creates a false news report that Manitas has been killed in gang warfare, and has his wife Jessi (Gomez) sent to Switzerland with their children so that they won’t be endangered by the power vacuum of Manitas’ “death.” Rita gets her money, Emilia greets a new dawn, and everything is peachy.

Except no, of course it’s not. We’re only halfway through, and we have so, so much more insulting material to shove down your throats. In London, a now wealthy and successful Rita goes to a fancy dinner where she meets Emilia, and instantly recognizes her. Admitting that this was not a chance encounter, Emilia enlists Rita’s help once again, this time to bring Jessi and the children back to Mexico. There she plans to basically have their old family life again, only with Emilia serving as auntie, her cover story being that she was Manitas’ long lost cousin. After meeting a random woman handing out flyers about her missing son — likely lost to cartel violence — she then resolves to start a non-profit organization (using her old criminal connections) to advocate efforts to find the missing and deceased. Meanwhile, now that she’s back home, Jessi rekindles a relationship with a sicario named Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez) with whom she had an affair during her marriage, and Emilia herself begins a tryst with the oh-so-subtly named Epifania (Adriana Paz, the main cast’s lone Mexican) the widow of an abusive gangster whose body Emilia’s organization has recovered.

Everything in this second half is some self-serving, sanctimonious bollocks. Rita does a half rap number where she pretends to call out all the moneyed interests who have skeletons in their own closets, but it’s complete hypocrisy, BECAUSE SHE’S LITERALLY TAKING MILLIONS FROM A MURDERER AND DRUG LORD! Seriously, she acts like there’s some degree of nobility in what she’s doing, but she’s just as mercenary as anyone else. The price for her complicity is just higher than the others, and it’s almost amazing how easily she can look the other way and not lump Emilia in with all the other powerful, rapacious men she loathes once Emilia loses her penis.

Then, naturally, there’s the bafflingly reductive and regressive motivation for all three main women: to be mothers. Rita constantly bemoans that no man will have her because of her busy working life, so she can never have kids of her own. Jessi wants to have the romantic passion she lost when Manitas “died,” but also wants to be a good mom. Emilia herself essentially uses her status to try and take ownership of the kids once more, even when one of them notes that she “smells like Papa” (another rare moment of intrigue). Hell, the climax is set into action by Emilia blowing her own cover and insisting that the kids are “my children” when Jessi mentions marrying Gustavo and moving to a new home. So don’t worry, ladies. Troubles may come and go, but this pasty, 70-year-old French man assures you that someday you too can be barefoot and pregnant, just like you always dreamed!

But worst of all is Emilia herself, and this may be the most daring and audacious slap in the face to the trans community. Throughout this back half, Emilia conducts herself as if the sex change is a full reset on her life. Sure, I’ve known LGBT people who sort of feel the same way on the surface, like finally coming out and living as their true selves is a new start, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. When I say “reset,” I mean that literally. Emilia treats her transition as a complete whitewashing. Manitas isn’t just a dead name, it’s a dead existence. She acts as if becoming Emilia absolves her of all her past sins, like everything that came before was just part of a bad dream, or an ethereal lie that’s been dispelled. In short, she feels like presenting as a woman means her actions as a man just didn’t happen. She deludes herself into thinking she’s helping people, creating her non-profit like it’s an act of charity and forward-thinking largesse, conveniently ignoring the possibility (or likelihood) that these dead and missing people got that way BECAUSE OF HER! It’d be one thing if she made it unambiguous that she thought that doing this could right her previous wrongs, but she doesn’t. She seems to truly believe that she’s a totally new individual, and that this is putting good into the universe rather than balancing it her own previous evil deeds. Someone else was responsible for this carnage, so she steps into the spotlight to “help” as a cause célèbre. She doesn’t seek forgiveness, but praise and adoration, because in her mind, breast implants were forgiveness enough.

That. Is. DISGUSTING! What’s more, it only serves to reinforce negative clichés and labels about both trans people and Mexicans. Look at what’s happening in this country right fucking now. Donald Trump has been President again for only three days, and in that time he’s used executive orders to define gender binaries as “biological reality” despite a wealth of medical study to the contrary, close a legal port of entry into the United States (the so-called “illegals” don’t cross there, only legal commerce and those seeking political asylum), undo anti-discrimination hiring policies for the federal government, change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” and attempt to rescind birthright citizenship in outright defiance of the U.S. Constitution. As a matter of policy, our country is now openly hostile to these groups, and images like this only make things worse. Trump and his ilk got into power by spending years demonizing these people completely without evidence, so why in God’s name are we giving them fodder by portraying a trans woman as a delusional, selfish criminal and Mexico as a land of hopeless corruption and drug killings? You’d arguably do less damage fire-bombing a taco truck.

Maybe if the surrounding production elements were great, this could be forgiven, but they most certainly are not. The camera work and editing are all over the place, almost like Audiard was trying to make another Chicago but stopped halfway and opted for . The songs themselves are mostly formless exposition dumps, and with one exception, every time they start to build momentum with the melodies and the onscreen choreography, they get cut off and we just jump to the next scene or idiotic line of dialogue. The sound design is particularly grating, as mundane noises are cranked up to 11 in the foley booth in an attempt to seem clever as they clumsily switch to the next number. This is most apparent when Rita first meets Manitas, and he literally taps his fingers on the table to start a rhythm. I’m predisposed to misophonia, and noises like that cause me physical pain. All of this is before we get to the script full of plot holes (why couldn’t Maintas just get the doctor who prescribed the hormone therapy to recommend a surgeon?) and the questionable propriety of using a longstanding national tragedy as Mexico’s cartel wars as fodder for a goddamn musical.

Then there’s Gascón in the dual lead role. There’s a major push to get her nominated for Best Actress, and maybe even the win (she lost the Golden Globe to Demi Moore), because wouldn’t it be just so awesome for her to be the first trans actress to get an Oscar? If it wasn’t obvious before, this should seal it that this is nothing more than an awards campaign disguised as a movie, because this is not a good performance. Gascón spends her time as Manitas growling and her time as Emilia preening. She says nothing of substance, her moments of emotion are just maudlin gibberish, and she carries herself in each scene as if there’s a massive sparkling soft filter on the camera lens. In essence, she acts like exactly what she is, a telenovela actress. Pamela Anderson is more Oscar-worthy, and you already know how I feel about her performance.

This reminds me a lot of when Ariana DeBose won Supporting Actress for the West Side Story remake. So much was made of her performance, but most of it was just aggressive stomp dancing. And honestly, if you’ve seen DeBose’s output since that win, you’d be left scratching your head, too. Coming off that triumph, she’s appeared in Wish, I.S.S., Argylle, House of Spoils, and Kraven the Hunter. Those films combined average 39.6% on Rotten Tomatoes, and particular criticism has been directed at her lackluster turns. Maybe, just maybe, I was right when I said that she’s not that good an actress, and all that mattered was the “moment” of having her and Rita Morena both win Oscars for playing the same role, and to have the first openly queer Oscar winner. The “message” was far more important than the merit, and the campaign for Gascón feels exactly the same.

Now, before anyone calls me a contrarian, or somehow anti-trans for not liking this film (did you not see the part where I gave Will & Harper an “A” because it dealt with an actual trans person), there are some parts I did like. As I mentioned before, there are brief moments where the film gets tantalizingly close to insight. The problem is that they’re instantly torpedoed by bullshit, which not only defeats the purpose but compounds the disappointment. While I have no love for Gascón’s performance, especially in Manitas form, the makeup job on her is pretty spectacular. Up until I heard the voice that sounded like it came out of an electrolarynx set to Slowpoke Rodriguez, Manitas looked genuinely threatening and imposing. If I didn’t know basic story structure, which told me Rita was in no real danger after establishing her as a lead, I would have been legit worried about her fate in that first meeting.

Most surprising to me is that I really enjoyed Selena Gomez. If you know me, you know I am very much not a fan of her work, either as an actress or a pop singer. I even joked about my favorite part of The Dead Don’t Die being her decapitation. And yet, Jessi was the one character who consistently kept me entertained and engaged, mostly because she felt the closest to a real person. She understands the type of man she’s cast her lot in with, even though she ironically doesn’t know that person identifies as a woman. She grieves his loss. She does her best to do right by her children without sacrificing her own personal agency and desire for companionship and love. Even the one song she gets, the shortlisted “Mi Camino,” appropriately explains her emotional state while being legit catchy (it’s also that one exception to what I noted above about the tracks feeling abruptly incomplete). On a meta level, I really enjoyed her assertive defense of herself when Emilia refers to Gustavo as her “pimp,” because honestly, if you can’t get Gomez to even blush about willingly fucking Justin Bieber, there’s no way in Hell you can possibly slut-shame her in ANY context.

In her performance of Jessi, I saw a character. With everyone else, I saw glorified minstrels. But even then, apparently I’m in a minority, as Mexican actors and filmmakers have derided Gomez, particularly her Spanish pronunciations and accent, as she’s not a native speaker. Like Saldaña, it feels like she was cast to make this “foreign” film more palatable for American audiences (and thus garner more votes from people too lazy to read subtitles), which arguably flies in the face of everything the Oscars should stand for, but I at least found her enjoyable, which is more than I can say for anyone else in the cast.

Even before the nominations come out tomorrow, you can already pencil this film in to win International Feature, and it’s likely got a strong chance at Original Song (“Mi Camino” was nominated for the Globe and Rita’s rap rant, “El Mal” won; it too is on the shortlist). Saldaña won the Globe for Supporting Actress, so don’t be surprised if she becomes the front-runner for that as well. This is the problem with letting hype dictate awards rather than actual quality. A bunch of celebrities have come out as fans, mostly because that’s what’s expected of them. In this industry, it’s uncouth to truly damn something. Even absolute dumpster fires like Megalopolis still get polite, effete praise from people in “the biz,” because they may be working with some of these filmmakers down the line and don’t want to upset them. There are also a fair amount of well-meaning people who basically stopped at “trans representation” and decided that was enough to endorse the picture as a form of virtue signaling. I get it, I really do. My lack of a filter in this regard has undoubtedly cost me a gig or two in my decade in this city, which is why I largely separate this blog from my 9–5.

But this is a textbook example of why For Your Consideration campaigns should be banned. The International Feature contest is meant to showcase creative, groundbreaking cinematic achievements from around the world. Emilia Pérez is the exact opposite. Nothing new is added to the public discourse, two of the three leads are American, and the director is dismissive to the point of eschewing even entry-level research into his subjects. This is a parody masquerading as a culture war conversation, and it often feels like it was created by an algorithm to check off prestige boxes, when it’s not outright denigrating the very people it’s depicting, making this a movie meant more for people who think signing a change.org petition counts as political engagement than an earnest illustration of gender identity.

At least for once, I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. A couple days before I watched it, I went upstairs to the kitchen and saw my roommates (a gay couple who are WAY into musicals and very active in the LGBT community, i.e. the ones you’d think would be the ideal target audience) taking it in themselves. When I finished, I asked them what they thought before giving my own opinion. The response, from someone much more diplomatic and disciplined with criticism than I, was, “I will be upset for every award it wins.” Yup.

Grade: D

Join the conversation in the comments below! What film should I review next? How many Oscars do you think this will win? Who thought a Busby Berkeley-style musical number in a plastic surgery clinic was a good idea? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!

Originally published at http://actuallypaid.com on January 23, 2025.

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William J Hammon
William J Hammon

Written by William J Hammon

All content is from the blog, “I Actually Paid to See This,” available at actuallypaid.com

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