With 13 Academy Award nominations, the — take a deep breath — French-made, Netflix-distributed, Mexican trans-narco musical “Emilia Pérez” made history Thursday morning.
It’s the most-nominated non-English-language film ever, just the third Spanish-language production to receive a best picture nod and also surpassed the original “West Side Story” for most Academy Award nominations of any movie about Latinos.
Karla Sofía Gascón — who plays the titular macho drug lord turned vivacious woman — is the first openly trans person nominated in any Oscar acting category. Zoe Saldaña, nominated for best supporting actress, has already won a Golden Globe and a Cannes acting award for her tour de force turn as Emilia’s resourceful lawyer, Rita Mora Castro — the first major prizes for the shamefully underrated performer. Jacques Audiard was also nominated for best director.
These accolades have come even as controversy has swirled around “Emilia Pérez” like one of its musical numbers.
Mexican intellectuals have accused the movie of reducing the country’s horrific drug wars — which have killed nearly half a million people, with more than 100,000 missing, in this century alone — to a song-and-dance farce. GLAAD described it as “a profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.”
On a podcast, superstar Mexican comic Eugenio Derbez ridiculed the accent of Mexican American Selena Gomez — who plays Emilia’s wife — as “indefensible,” comments for which he later apologized. Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto told Deadline that he found the film “completely inauthentic” for not having enough Mexicans in front of and behind the camera.
The furor has been such that Audiard went on CNN en Español last week to say he was “sorry” if viewers found his film “shocking.”
Films and television shows about Mexico’s cartels will never end, so I initially had no plans to see “Emilia Pérez.” The buzz, good and bad, eventually made me curious enough to stream the film. As someone who has tracked depictions of Mexicans in cinema since my days as a film studies major at Chapman University, I had to: All the Oscar attention will make it one of the most prominent films about the Mexican condition in recent times.
I understand Prieto and Derbez’s points, as fresa (snooty) as they are. The accents are all over the place, and the Mexican Spanish isn’t always accurate (the proper term for prison in Mexico is penitenciaria, for instance, not cárcel). Audiard reduces Mexico City, one of the world’s great cities, to a bunch of interiors and taco stalls — unsurprisingly, since he shot his movie mostly on sound stages in France.
I can also see why GLAAD is so upset at the French director for turning a decision as personal as transitioning into a segment straight out of the late, great television show “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” complete with bandaged patients shouting “Vaginoplasty!” and “Penoplasty!”
The dialogue isn’t particularly memorable, the English subtitles are wildly off, the songs are forgettable (though two of them earned Oscar nominations) and the few straight Mexican men who appear are — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — corrupt, oversexed or ultraviolent. I have no issue with a non-Mexican director doing a film about the country and its people, but at least nail its essence, you know?
What elevates “Emilia Pérez” are the powerhouse performances by Saldaña, Gascón, Gomez and Mexican actress Adriana Paz, who plays Emilia’s love interest. What kept me watching was hoping against hope that the film could bring something new to the narco genre, as defenders say it has.
The choice of the musical format wasn’t insulting at all. The best musicals, whether on stage or screen, use their fantastical trappings to address contemporary events and issues — think of the morality play over race and class that is “Wicked” or the French Revolution as experienced through “Les Misérables.” One of the most lacerating fictional critiques of the American dream remains the song “Remember My Forgotten Man” and its accompanying set piece in Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers of 1933.” One of the most hilarious ripostes to Nazism is still Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”
“Emilia Pérez” thinks it’s in that transgressive tradition. Instead, it turns out like every other narco movie. Audiard, for all his insistence that his modern-day opera breaks stereotypes about Mexicans, falls for one of the worst of them at exactly the point where “Emilia Pérez” — both the film and the character — is supposed to find its heart.
About halfway through the movie, Rita and Emilia are enjoying food at an outdoor market when a woman hands them a flier with a photo of her son, who disappeared years ago. Emilia admits she has regrets about the role she played in murdering so many people and plunging Mexico into perpetual chaos. Rita urges her boss to do something about it. The two set up an organization that helps find the remains of los desaparecidos — the disappeared — and sparks a moral revolution.
Audiard treats their efforts as an unprecedented breakthrough for Mexico, when that’s not the case at all. People have long done this work, and will continue to do so long after the film’s hype dies down. At the risk of their own lives, they, along with journalists, have named names — something “Emilia Pérez” dares not do.
In the CNN en Español interview, Audiard admitted that he had no interest in depicting Mexico as it actually is, stating, “If I have to choose between the legend and the fact, I prefer to write the legend” — parroting the famous conclusion in John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
To disappear real-life anti-narco activists is a disgrace, one topped only by the ludicrous, sacrilegious finale. Spoiler alert: Skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know how it ends.
A crowd sings about how Emilia “worked the miracle/Of turning lead to gold” and parades a statue of her, robed and arms outstretched like the Virgin Mary, through the streets while a Oaxacan brass band plays a funeral waltz.
In the end, “Emilia Pérez” is a wannabe “Mrs. Doubtfire” that replaces humor and genius with hubris and guns. No wonder the film nabbed so many Oscar nominations: Academy members are always going to want their cinematic Mexico to be a pitiable hellhole in need of salvation and a reminder to change its errant ways, a trope that goes back to the days of Manifest Destiny.
Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to Hollywood.
