Emilia Pérez is a star-studded Oscars favourite, but it has become mired in controversy and criticism

Despite the high level of discussion surrounding "Emilia Pérez," you might think this award-winning Mexican musical soap opera, directed by French director Jacques Audiard, is worth watching. However, the fact that Greta Gerwig, president of the jury at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, presented the Best Actress award to the cast of "Emilia Pérez" doesn't mean the film itself is a masterpiece.

One of the biggest highlights of "Emilia Pérez" lies in its premise. This genre-bending film opens with Rita Morá Castro (played by Zoë Saldaña), an overworked Mexican-Dominican lawyer, busy preparing a case where her team is defending a media mogul accused of murdering his wife. Since "Emilia Pérez" is a musical, Rita navigates through a crowd of street vendors singing about violence, justice, and death, stating, "This is a love story." The stage is set.

After winning the case and the man being acquitted, Rita is kidnapped by cartel drug lord Juan "Manitas" Del Monte (played by Karla Sofía Gascón). Manitas wishes to transition into a woman and offers Rita a lucrative deal she can't refuse: a hefty $2 million payment if she secretly arranges their gender confirmation surgery, helps them fake their death and establish a new legal identity, and relocates their family safely to Switzerland.

This part of the film begins to get messy. Rita travels the world in search of a surgeon, most notably in Bangkok, where a group of doctors and nurses take turns singing the ludicrous song "Vaginoplasty," chanting "Man to woman, woman to man." After countless international trips, Rita finally settles on Israeli surgeon Dr. Wasserman (played by Mark Ivanir), and Manitas' gender confirmation surgery takes place in Tel Aviv. The uncritical inclusion of a major plot development in a country that has illegally occupied Palestinian territories since 1967 and is currently embroiled in a brutal and polarizing war is, to say the least, a reckless choice. This is one of the film’s many blind spots, embodying a kind of imperialist feminism.

The cartel boss is reborn as Emilia Pérez, a sophisticated woman with a vast fortune of dubious origin. But it turns out that Emilia cannot stay away from her family: wife Jessie (played by Selena Gomez) and their two sons, who still don’t know Emilia is alive. She approaches Rita again—this time to arrange a reunion with them, under the guise that Emilia is a long-lost relative of Manitas. Aside from the obvious plot holes, things get even more absurd when Emilia impulsively establishes an NGO dedicated to recovering the remains of Mexicans who have gone missing due to cartel-related violence—murders she, in many cases, is responsible for.

Deception permeates every aspect of Emilia’s life—familial, where she pretends to be a long-lost relative, deceiving her children and wife; and professional, where she conceals her identity to atone for her sins, seek redemption, and evade accountability. "Emilia Pérez" is rife with problematic gender essentialism, with Emilia completely subverting her moral code after transitioning into a woman. Emilia can be a kind and cultured woman, but when she is abusive, manipulative, and possessive, she speaks in a more masculine voice—attributing limited qualities to each gender and portraying transition as an act of deception.

Despite Emilia's transformation into a new person, the consequences of her past as a drug lord who murdered and kidnapped countless people remain, as does her wealth and network of corrupt cronies. A more interesting and less reductionist film could have explored Emilia's struggle with this reality, rather than splitting her past and present selves into mutually exclusive identities—seemingly unrelated to each other—and presenting gender transition as a redemptive placebo that absolves Emilia of her past sins. To make matters worse, Emilia’s transformation is underpinned by a lack of sensitivity and factual accuracy. In an otherwise touching moment, Emilia’s children—who think she’s their aunt—say she smells like their father, which would be impossible given the hormone replacement therapy Emilia is undergoing. There is deadnaming, misgendering, and the use of "half" language to describe transgender identity.

Gascón is particularly brilliant in the dual role of Emilia before and after transitioning, but even her masterful performance cannot save a mediocre script filled with drawn-out setups and sudden bursts of song. Saldaña seems to be in a completely different movie—playing a dutifully complicit sidekick who is often involved in evil but lacks the agency to do anything about it, or at least the courage to indulge in her own self-interest. Gomez as Jessie is particularly bad—the only thing worse than her monotone performance is her stilted Spanish. Adriana Paz as Emilia’s girlfriend, Epifania, is great but underutilized.

"Emilia Pérez" is a musical, but one must ask the question: why? None of the randomly inserted songs are particularly catchy or memorable—if they can even be called songs, with some just being dialogue set to a beat. Although, the ones sung by Gascón are at least heartfelt. Even more shocking, for a film that is ostensibly about Mexicans, there is only one Mexican actor in the main cast: Paz. The film was shot in France by a non-Spanish-speaking director who admitted to knowing little about Mexico, and the film itself proves it. Problematic stereotypes abound: characters are said to smell like tequila and guacamole; sensationalist narratives about drug cartels persist; and obvious errors are rife.

"Emilia Pérez" is neither serious enough to be a social commentary on issues of gender, self, and redemption, nor silly or campy enough to be an outright farce, and instead, it reinforces the very prejudices it seeks to dismantle—despite having all the trappings of a prestige film and the actors' best efforts.