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Photo: Shanna Besson/Pathé
This article was originally published on November 14, 2024. On January 23, 2025, Emilia Pérez was nominated for 13 Oscars, including Best Picture. On January 30, the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, deleted her X account following a backlash to past offensive tweets.
Spoilers for the end of Emilia Pérez, which is streaming on Netflix now.
The final scene in Emilia Pérez, the controversial musical about a trans Mexican cartel leader, includes the film’s most potentially significant transformation. The camera pans out to show the funeral procession for Emilia (Karla Sofia Gascón), after she dies in a fiery car crash alongside her estranged wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her wife’s lover Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). Throughout the film, Emilia atones for her ostensibly violent past by helping families recover some of the media designated- “desaparecidos,” — casualties of drug trade violence. In death she is borne aloft by mourners as a life-sized plastic Catholic Virgin. Led by Emilia’s girlfriend, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), relatives of victims pay loving homage to the tear-stained effigy: “A quién hizo el milagro de cambiar el dolor en oro” (“to the one who miraculously turned pain into gold.”)
Based on an opera libretto written by French director Jacques Audiard, Emilia won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in May, and it has deservedly garnered acclaim for the performances, including Zoe Saldaña as Emilia’s lawyer, Rita, and Spanish telenovela actor Gascón as the title character. (The film’s stars took home a combined Best Actress award at Cannes.) The film is supposed to be a portrait of women living amid Mexico’s violence and femicide crisis.
But as the movie builds up to Emilia’s death as the emotional climax, it loses any subtlety. While the funeral works as a cathartic moment for the audience, it also shows how—rather than encouraging reflection on the inequality that the characters sing about—the film uses Emilia’s journey to paper over them.
From the start Audiard sets us into these women’s worlds ostensibly from their perspective. Rita, Emilia’s self-described “prieta” lawyer, who helps Emilia navigate her medical transition, sings a rock song about corruption and her difficulties climbing up the corporate ladder as a Black Latina woman. Post transition, Emilia falls for Epifanía, the mestiza wife of a man murdered in the drug war. Jessi, a disgruntled gringa, wishes to run off with Gustavo and take her children with her, setting in motion the film’s fiery culmination. These characters promise a complex gaze into the Mexican society the film is set in.
To understand why the film fails, it’s important to acknowledge the determining weight of race and class in Latin America, and the ideology of mestizaje. That belief system is Latin America’s version of “I don’t see color.” Instead it says: “we’re all mixed,” some combination of Black, Indigenous, and European. This helps symbolically unite the countries amid massive racial and class inequalities that benefit a white and white-adjacent bourgeoise. Arguably, mestizaje also helps gloss over societal anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. Those are precisely some of the marginalizations that render the “disappeared” — often working -class and non-white — an underclass, expendable by violent actors and the state.
From the start, though, the film seems to miss those cultural distinctions. The way race determines class means that Latin America’s cartel leaders aren’t usually blue eyed European descendants. Their distance from that kind of whiteness is part of what shuts them out of opportunities, and is why many of them— from Griselda Blanco to “El Chapo” and Pablo Escobar — turned to violent, underground economies. The potentially nuanced reasons for how or why Emilia rose through the ranks aren’t ever explained or teased out.
Instead of showing us her life through her eyes, the film focuses on her transness, which it turns into a medicalized spectacle. One oddly literal musical number takes place in a hospital where the staff shout out various surgical procedures at Rita, as she determines which doctor would work best for Emilia. Rita is the film’s moral consciousness, but the story is never told from her perspective or about her. Emilia’s girlfriend’s Epifania is similarly flattened. We know nothing about her save her status as a survivor of domestic abuse. And aside from Epifania,