All or Nothing: A Defense of Embattled Transgender Film ‘Emilia Pérez’

Back in November, I attended the 47th Annual Denver Film Festival and, one of the films I reviewed while there was Netflix’s transgender-themed musical dramedy Emilia Pérez, which the festival held a special screening of just a few days before it debuted on Netflix. The screening conflicted with the closing film that was playing at the festival, September 5, but when I read the description of Emilia Pérez that said it was a musical about a Mexican drug cartel leader who sought to transition from male to female, that sounded exactly like something I would be more interested in than the closing night film. So much so, in fact, that, even though my press pass didn’t cover the screening of Emilia Pérez because it was receiving the festival’s Rare Pearl Award, I made a special request with the festival organizers to ask to be let into the screening of this film that sounded really exciting.

I absolutely loved Emilia Pérez, giving it a whopping score of 96/100 in my rundown of the second half of the festival. In the film, Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), a cartel leader who is going by the name Juan “Manitas” Del Monte at the beginning of the film, recruits a lawyer named Rita (Zoe Saldaña) to help her research how to transition from male to female by faking the death of Manitas and reemerging under a different identity as Emilia. In doing so, she doesn’t tell anyone in her life about her transition, including her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez), who is led to believe her spouse has died. But when Emilia seeks to bring her wife and children back into her life, she finds that her old life and her new life collide in unfortunate ways.

I was excited to see a transgender-themed film with such a unique format, and the performances absolutely blew me away. Of particular interest to me was the performance of Gomez as Emilia’s long-suffering wife Jessi, which became the first performance from Gomez to really make me take her seriously as an actress. I considered the movie to be a profound tragedy, and a cautionary tale about exactly how not to go about your transition as a transgender person.

Writing before most of the world had seen the movie, I found, to my shock, that there was a large portion of the LGBTQ+ community and our allies that deeply disagreed with my assessment of the film. Reanna Cruz of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast said of the film, “The entire time I was watching it I had a really weird feeling in my stomach because to me it seemed like the filmmaker was painting trans women as liars.” A blog post from the famous LGBTQ+ advocacy organization GLAAD called the film a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.”

But perhaps nobody has had as many negative things to say about this film as the LGBTQ+ news site Them.us, one of my favorite queer publications on the web that I turn to for a lot of my news and opinion on important topics that affect the community. Them has written a number of articles about the film, and pretty much everything that they’ve written about the film since its release has been negative, or at the very least continually call the film “controversial.” Most recently, Them wrote an article in advance of last night’s Golden Globe Awards ceremony entitled “Emilia Pérez Is Bad, Actually. Why Does Awards Season Love It?” In this article, Them site director Samantha Allen, executive editor Fran Tirado, and staff writer James Factora break down everything that they hated about the film and why they find it perplexing that a movie like this would be such a favorite for awards season.

While I cannot overstate enough how much I love and respect Them and their perspective on a lot of important issues to the queer community, I have to respectfully disagree with Allen, Tirado, and Factora’s opinions on this film. Obviously, all three of these writers and I are writing for queer publications, and, for all of us, the media’s representation of transgender people is an important topic. I don’t doubt that all three writers had the best of intentions, and that their criticisms come from a place of perfectly reasonable protectiveness towards the trans community. But, as a transgender woman who found the movie to be a compelling story about the trans community that never felt like it was insulting my identity, I have to give my rebuttal to these writers and their assessment of the film.

The Vaginoplasty Song

One of the biggest complaints that I see from Them, as well as from users on Twitter, is about the song “La Vaginoplastia.” In this song, Rita is sent to find the perfect surgeon to perform Emilia’s gender confirmation surgery, and, in the process, sings a song about vaginoplasty and the other various gender-affirming procedures that trans women go through. The song has gone viral on Twitter, with many people mocking the song as silly and ridiculous and many saying that the song has the wrong tone for the otherwise very serious film.

Factora compares the tone of the overall film to Repo: The Genetic Opera, citing “La Vaginoplastia” in particular, saying, “Maybe it was just the vaguely horrific vaginoplasty number of it all, but at least with Repo! they had the audacity to be over-the-top about it.” Then Allen echoes that sentiment, saying, “Honestly, the ‘vaginoplasty’ number needed to either be toned down significantly or be Rocky Horror balls-to-the-wall outrageous, as you suggested James, instead of languishing in some weird middle area.”

In a different article for Them, Factora summed up how much the song had been ridiculed on Gay Twitter. I find it a little hard to understand how you can claim that the song doesn’t go “balls-to-the-wall” enough while, at the same time, the song went viral for being ridiculous. Doesn’t the simple fact that it went so viral for that reason suggest that it’s already an over-the-top number?

The underlying suggestion of Them’s critique that the song didn’t go over-the-top enough is that the filmmakers took the song too seriously, that they didn’t understand how absurd singing about vaginoplasty was. But I think there’s more self-awareness to this song than these writers and many people on Twitter give it credit for.

The song doesn’t have a ton of lyrics, and mostly features singers repeating the names of procedures and then finishes off with a refrain of “A man to a woman, a woman to a man.” But could anyone possibly have put together a dance number using hospital beds to the repetition of the word “vaginoplasty” and not have fully understood how outrageously hilarious that is? This film does move through a lot of contrasting tones, that’s true, but I would argue that it also knows its limits. I think “La Vaginoplastia” goes about as silly as the song can without moving so far into silliness that it no longer fits into the larger story, which is, at its heart, not a comedy but a tragedy.

The Lies of Emilia

The next critique I want to address is the idea that the film depicts transgender women as liars, which came up from Them as well as from some of the other aforementioned critics. To make this argument, I do want to warn you that I’ll be forced to give spoilers for the ending of the movie. So if you still want to enjoy the ending, I suggest coming back to this article after you watch the film.

Fran Tirado is the one who makes the most extensive critique in the Them article that Emilia is depicted as a liar, drawing a negative comparison to Robin Williams’ 1993 comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, another film that is viewed with some controversy by the queer community. “(Emilia) swaps genders, refuses accountability for a lifetime of bad behavior, and gaslights her wife and kids into spending time with her under fraudulent pretenses,” Tirado argues. “This is also the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire, but Mrs. Doubtfire is a good film because it understands how absurd the character is. Emilia Pérez doesn’t know how absurd she is. Instead, her transition is framed as an absolution, used as a tool for deception, and made to be the reason for her redemption and saint-like anointing at the end. It is an idea of transness so completely from the cis imagination. If the film had instead realized, ‘No, Emilia really is the villain,’ and she kept on with her bad behavior, maybe murdered more people, spun out of control, fed her own absurdity—Now that’s the movie I signed up for!”

First, I want to say that I do agree that Emilia is the villain, at least to an extent, but again, I think the film is more aware of that than Them is giving it credit for. Like I said in the last section, I feel like the film is a tragedy and, in traditional tragic style, Emilia makes a truly tragic mistake which, in this case, is the decision to hide her transition from her wife, Jessi. Because of this decision, Jessi, rightfully, comes to resent Emilia’s new identity, not realizing that the reason why Emilia is so possessive towards Jessi and her children is because Emilia is Jessi’s spouse and the biological parent of Jessi’s children. Instead, she thinks that Emilia is a distant relative of Jessi’s late spouse who forms an obsessive and irrational attachment to Jessi’s children and tries to control them financially. This leads to Jessi lashing out against Emilia and kidnapping her to regain some financial control over her own life which, ultimately, causes both Jessi’s and Emilia’s tragic deaths.

At no point in the film did I feel like Emilia was absolved of her former life as a violent and murderous cartel leader simply because of her transition. Rather, Emilia, in her new life, dedicates her life to trying to help victims of drug cartels in a desperate attempt to atone for her sins in her former life. But is there any amount of good she can do that will really absolve her of the things she did in her former life? While the people who know Emilia think of her as a saint when she dies, I never got the impression that the film expected us to see her that way. I felt like the film understood that Emilia is a more morally complex character than that, and that it depicts the sort of saint-like canonization of Emilia after her death as the view of people who didn’t know who she truly was.

Emilia’s tragic flaw, or tragic mistake, is also the reason I came to love Jessi as a character, and Selena Gomez’s performance as Jessi in particular. I said this in my review but I think it bears repeating: Jessi was robbed of the opportunity to make a decision that she should have been allowed to make, the decision of whether she wanted to come with her spouse on this journey through her transition. Would Jessi have accompanied Emilia on that journey? That’s really hard to say, but it’s almost beside the point. She should have been given the choice, and the fact that she wasn’t is the first of many injustices visited upon Jessi by Emilia. That’s the main reason why Jessi is, in my opinion, the most sympathetic character in the film, to the point where I don’t really blame Jessi when she kidnaps Emilia and threatens her at the end of the film.

Admittedly, the idea that Jessi never figures out that Emilia is her presumed-dead spouse until Emilia admits it to her is a bit of a stretch, and not only because Jessi spends so much time living with Emilia after her transition. In the dialogue early in the film, it’s explained that Emilia, when she’s still identifying as Manitas, has been taking estrogen for two years, and she demonstrates to Rita that she has already begun to develop breasts. In addition to breasts, estrogen causes loss of body hair, as well as significant erectile dysfunction. It’s hard to imagine that a woman with any amount of intimacy with her spouse would fail to notice that something strange was going on after two years on estrogen. But, if you’re willing to overlook that plot hole—and the film certainly does try its hardest to gloss over that plot hole—the emotional journey that the characters take because of Emilia’s lies is the most compelling part of the film.

I don’t think the film depicts trans women as liars. Rather, I think the film depicts Emilia, in particular, as a liar. I don’t think we have to extrapolate that to represent the entire trans community. Emilia doesn’t transition in the way that most trans women transition. For most of us, we transition gradually, come out to our family and friends honestly, and bring them along with us on our journey if they’re willing to come along. I felt like this film very intentionally had Emilia go about her transition the wrong way, and it definitely wants us to understand that that’s the wrong way. In some ways, it’s a product of what Emilia did before she came out. As a cartel leader, she was hardly surrounded by people who were easy to come out to or who were likely to accept her transition. Living in a world of toxic masculinity and violence, she must have felt extremely unsafe about the idea of any of her peers finding out who she really was. But the film seems to be explicitly telling us that, nevertheless, transitioning in such a dishonest way is a mistake, and it’s the tragic mistake that kills Emilia in the end.

Conclusion: Does Emilia Pérez Deserve Awards?

Look, I won’t deny that awards voters have an unfortunate tendency to see problematic and condescending depictions of minority groups as empowering and give them awards they don’t really deserve. The 2018 Oscar winner for Best Picture, Green Book, was widely criticized for being a racist film masquerading as an anti-racist film, and disappointingly beat out some films that had a better understanding of racial issues like Black Panther and Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman. But perhaps the most perplexing decision came in 2009 when The Blind Side—an obviously racist depiction of a rich white family adopting a poor black boy, a film that was highly criticized by the real-life person it was based on—was nominated for the Best Picture award at the Oscars, which it thankfully lost, but Sandra Bullock inexplicably won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in it. So yes, awards voters can and often do make rather egregious mistakes.

But I don’t think Emilia Pérez is another Blind Side. Rather, I think it’s a compelling depiction of a morally complex character that puts trans issues at front and center. No, the trans character is not a good person, but I don’t think that necessarily has to be the case for it to be a good movie or for it to be an accurate portrayal of trans issues. The fact that it moved through so many tones, managed to work in musical numbers in a unique way that works, and featured outstanding performances by all the actresses involved all add up to it being one of the best films of the year.

And, following the film’s many wins at last night’s Golden Globe Awards including the award for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, I think it’s inevitable that this movie is going to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture and pick up a number of Oscar wins. I may be amongst the minority in the LGBTQ+ community doing this, but I’ll be applauding it for every award it wins. I’m glad to see a trans-themed film helmed by a trans actress finally get the recognition it

Emilia Pérez is streaming on Netflix

Photo courtesy of Netflix