I firmly believe that if a piece of art can make you feel something, then it has succeeded on some level. Whether it’s jubilant glee or a pit in your stomach shouldn’t matter, only that it affects you emotionally. Yet as the closing credits of Emilia Pérez rolled, I couldn’t help but feel that the visceral discomfort the film had left me with was somehow wrong. 

When I first heard that a narco thriller/transition narrative/surrealist musical had won both the Jury Prize and Best Actress Awards at the Cannes Festival, I could barely wait to see it. I was devastated to discover that it wasn’t playing at the local theatre, but now, I recognize that was a blessing in disguise. 

I honestly don’t think I could’ve handled watching Emilia Pérez around other people. 

The film follows its eponymous protagonist played by Karla Sofía Gascón through her transition from Manitas del Monte, feared cartel leader, to Emilia Pérez, lauded philanthropist, centering around the tension between the beauty of reinvention and the inescapability of one’s past. 

At face value, I should love this story. If there’s one thing I want to see more of in queer media it’s messy, imperfect trans characters. 

I want to see trans characters permitted all the flaws, hopes, and complexities of their cis contemporaries, not just idealized angels or caricatured monsters. I want to see human trans characters. 

The issue is that while Emilia is certainly complex, she still doesn’t feel entirely human.

Manitas isn’t just a man, he’s the man: greasy skin, bushy beard, seldom seen outside of grimy darkness, primarily associated with dominance, violence, and machismo. And Emilia isn’t just a woman, she’s the woman: glamorous, thoughtful, with the perfect outfit for every occasion, and driven by a strong maternal urge to protect and nurture her children. 

Each side of Emilia is symbolic before it is human, a symbol that goes so much further than gender alone. Manitas is not only emblematic of manhood, but of violence and evil. Emilia, in turn, represents womanhood as well as charity and goodness.

These sets of opposites are intertwined to the point where gender in the context of the narrative has an inescapable moral character. Maleness is monstrosity and womanhood is virtue. A trans woman could never just be a trans woman, she must be an archetypal redeemed sinner, a walking, talking yin-yang.

To be clear, I don't think that this film’s moralization of gender is “feminism gone too far” or anything. Frankly I don’t think it’s feminist at all, though it’s clearly trying to be. 

Early in the film, Zoe Saldana’s character, Rita, is trying to convince a doctor to perform gender reassignment surgery on Manitas. In response to the doctor’s skepticism and claims that he can only change someone’s external appearance, Rita argues that changing the body changes society, and changing society changes the soul. 

This idea of social positionality and societal treatment altering one’s sense of self is genuinely compelling and it would have been really interesting if the film went on to explore how life as a woman impacts Emilia, rather than simply treating it as the absence of masculine expectations.

For a film supposedly centered around the stark difference between Emilia’s life before and after transitioning, Emilia Pérez shows very few examples of how the gendered experience of womanhood actually affects its protagonist. 

There is no moment where misogynistic treatment or any other facet of womanhood changes her outlook or influences her decisions. Emilia is different from Manitas simply because she is. 

With no real gendered analysis, the film’s moral outlook on gender is not a feminist deconstruction, but a toothless “men are from mars, women are from venus” narrative.

The one moment where Emilia’s gender genuinely seems relevant to the way the world treats her comes at the end of the film. As awful as it is, there are few things more definitionally female than suffering violence and brutalization at the hands of men. 

Emilia Pérez is far from the first crime thriller to end with the demise of an ex-criminal protagonist at the hands of people doing the same things they once did. “You cannot escape the sins of your past, you must atone” isn’t necessarily a bad moral for that sort of story, but in a story where a trans woman’s sins of the past are so inexorably bound together with her former male identity, this ending takes on a far more insidious tone. 

Indeed, Emilia cannot escape the crimes of her past self, first and foremost.

In Emilia Pérez, the only way for a trans woman to reconcile her sin of past maleness is by being murdered by men taking on the same social role she once did. Emilia is martyred and canonized, taking the secret of who she once was to the grave, and only then can she be free. 

For a film that seems to want to tell a new and fresh trans narrative, writer/director Jacques Adriard certainly arrived at a conclusion we’ve all seen time and time again.

While the ending of Emilia Pérez was certainly gut-wrenching, it wasn’t the reason the movie made me so uncomfortable. My discomfort was born out of the palpable tension between the story it was trying to tell, and the story that it told. 

Some films sweep me away, leaving me entirely taken by the director’s vision. Some grant me an entirely different takeaway from what was intended, and some leave me puzzled as to what exactly the creators were trying to do at all. 

With this film, I could feel the story it was trying to tell, straining at its chains from just under the surface, held back by the inevitable moral conclusions of its flawed framing.

For every moment that should have been impactful, there was something holding it back. I found this especially prevalent throughout the film’s musical numbers; visually stunning, phenomenally acted and sung, yet so often polluted by some sort of questionable framing device.

 In “Deseo”, Manitas’ swan song, he eulogizes his own life as a man, showing vulnerability for the very first time. This takes place in the same room where he bares his newly growing breasts to Rita, her shocked reaction highlighting the scene’s voyeurism. 

“Papa”, a song sung by Emilia’s son, is one of the few moments where her time as Manitas is portrayed as meaningful in some way, yet it is still inevitably framed as oppositional with her current self when the boy clarifies he likes how she naturally smells, but not her perfume. 

“El Mal’s” spectacular choreography and stunning performance from Zoe Saldana lambasts the corruption of the Mexican government, hidden behind their masks of propriety. When the song ends, Rita’s finger points directly at Emilia, who has been in the spotlight the whole time. The unspoken implication, of course, is that Emilia’s own identity is the greatest mask of them all.

And then there’s the vaginoplasty song.

If I’m being completely honest, this single song featuring such lines as “Man to woman / From penis to vaginaaaa”, and “Vaginoplasty for the men too / Vaginoplasty makes the men happy” as grinning, wide eyed doctors and plastic surgery patients prance across the screen, probably made me about 30% less charitable towards the film as a whole. 

Maybe that’s not fair, but it genuinely just broke me. 

It’s probably one of the most baffling creative decisions ever put in a film and I could probably write an entire review about that one song alone. It’s only two minutes long and not directly relevant to my broader gripes, but I just had to mention it.

Anyways.

This film frustrates me because it could’ve been so much more. I want to see a complex, flawed trans woman who is treated as a complete person, not as two symbolic half-people. I wanted to love this film, but it ended up making me pessimistic, making me worry that we as a society are not ready to tell these sorts of stories yet, that any attempt to do so will be tainted by the fact that trans women’s internalities are still so inaccessible to the broader public.

That was how I wanted to end this review. Then, as I was writing it, I went back and watched the final scene of Emilia Pérez again, a song called “Las Damas que Pasan,” “The Ladies Passing By.”

To she who drank from my fountains, whose mystery I miss like a distant star

In that moment, I saw the film that they were trying to make. I was able to appreciate the brilliant performances of Gascón, Saldana, and their co-stars Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz without feeling they had been wasted. I was able to engage with Emilia as a human character, to see the tender moments that had been overshadowed by flaws on my first viewing and find grief, rather than frustration in her sacrifice. 

I can’t tell you exactly why this happened, but I think that giving the film some space, then coming back made its many flaws fade away as abstractions, leaving me able to focus on the emotionally resonant core freely. 

In that moment, I cried, both for Emilia, and for the film that this could have been.

It’s not exactly satisfying to write over 1000 words of harsh critique, only to turn heel and say “but I actually liked it kinda though” at the end, and I have to imagine it isn’t satisfying to read either, so I apologize, but it’s the only honest way I can write this review. I stand by my critique of the film’s framing and central conceit, but I can’t let myself limit my review to that alone. 

This film no longer makes me feel pessimistic, quite the opposite in fact. If even my cynical eyes could see the beautiful story underneath Emilia Pérez’s messy surface. Maybe the next trans-centric film that receives critical acclaim will be able to articulate itself without falling into transmisogynistic tropes. 

Emilia Pérez is on Netflix. I’d recommend giving it a watch, keeping its flaws in mind, and seeing if you can feel the story underneath regardless. If you can’t, you can at least appreciate the remarkable performances from its cast. If you can, I don’t know how you’ll feel about it, but I can guarantee you’ll feel something. 

Whether it’s discomfort, sorrow, joy, anger, or some messy combination of feelings that contradict each other every second, you’ll feel something. And isn’t that the goal of any piece of art?

To she who will never come back

To she who kept her secret

I offer these flowers