'Emilia Pérez is a groundbreaking trainwreck'

You've never seen a movie quite like Emilia Pérez, and not just because the word "Vaginoplasty" is sung with surprising gusto in one of the film's key numbers.

Emilia Pérez is a Spanish language musical crime comedy directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard that stars Gamora and Mabel, aka Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, as two women caught up in the disappearance of a famous cartel leader. But more importantly than that, Emilia Pérez also stars Spanish game-changer Karla Sofía Gascón, aka the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival (which was shared with the rest of the film's female ensemble).

Gascón plays the titular Emilia pre and post transition, taking on her journey from a rich fearsome criminal mastermind to a rich and still fearsome charity benefactor who can't escape her seedy past life, no matter how hard she tries.

Ahead of its arrival on Netflix, the film has already garnered plenty of buzz which could very well translate into an Oscar nomination for Gascón.

That's huge. To date, only three openly trans people have been nominated for an Oscar in any category: English composer Angela Morley was nominated twice after coming out as a trans woman in 1972 — for 1974's The Little Prince and 1976's The Slipper and the Rose: The Story of Cinderella — and musician Anohni was then nominated forty years later (!!) for her song that soundtracked Racing Extinction in 2016.

Two years on, documentary filmmaker Yance Ford became the first openly trans man to receive a nomination for his film Strong Island while Daniela Vega — the phenomenal star of A Fantastic Woman — became the first openly trans performer to present at the Oscars (after she was robbed of her own Oscar nom for acting that same year).

So yes, a potential nomination for Gascón would be groundbreaking, making her the first trans actor of any gender to be considered for Hollywood's most prestigious award. But just as Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody were crafted with white people and the straights in mind, the same can also be said for Emilia Pérez. Except, this time around, it's the cis viewers who are being placated in this insensitive mess of a film that's already drawn criticism from a wide number of trans journalists (see Drew Burnett Gregory's stellar review at Autostraddle, for example).

None of that will probably matter to the predominantly cis voting body at the Oscars — or their peers for that matter either. To them, recognition for Emilia Pérez will be an excuse for these voters to pat themselves on the back for a job well done. If only the film itself could be described as such.

On the surface of it all, you'd be hard pressed to suggest that Emilia Pérez is boring. The musical numbers especially are quite audacious at times, both structurally and formally speaking. Yet it's the film's preoccupation with the surface exterior of Emilia herself that ends up being tedious, playing into transphobic tropes long thought banished to the realms of hell where Buffalo Bill's dress and Ace Ventura's hair wax can be found.

Take the very first scene between Saldaña's Rita and Gascón's character who's yet to transition at this point. To prove she's serious about gender-affirming surgery, Emilia opens her shirt to reveal how her body has changed after taking female hormones for the better part of two years.

While we don't see the effects for ourselves, Rita's reaction is akin to the one elicited by the blood-soaked crowd who encounter Monstro Elisasue on stage at the end of The Substance. Ok, Rita's a bit more measured in her response than that, but the horror is there on her face nonetheless, reducing Emilia to something freakish and decidedly "other".

It doesn't stop there either. Throughout the film, Emilia Pérez is endlessly subjected to misgendering and deadnaming at every turn while even Emilia herself bizarrely refers to her body as "half he, half she" during a romantic number with another woman.

This emphasis on physical transformation over Emilia's internal journey is established early on in the film's most ridiculous scene where a plastic surgeon and Rita sing about all the procedures Pérez will need to transition. Words like "Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!" are awkwardly thrown out as nurses dance and twirl around various patients in the hospital..

While a director like Pedro Almodóvar knows how to utilise camp as a vehicle for deeper meaning, Audiard's approach here is as clunky as Selena Gomez's accent while playing Emilia's long-suffering wife.

The worst moment however, worse even than the fate that eventually befalls Emilia, is the moment when our protagonist angrily throws his unsuspecting wife onto a bed and threatens her using the same low, masculine voice she used pre-surgery. It's as if the so-called "evil" in Emilia is a separate entity, the "man" she was raised to be, rather than her being the same person going through a transitional journey.

With all that in mind, it's baffling to think that a movie so bold in places — "Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!" — can be so boring in others, let alone worthy of Oscar consideration.

Watch the trailer for Emilia Pérez:

This isn't to say that Emilia Pérez is terrible throughout though. There are some moments worthy of acclaim still, both in terms of the writing and acting. Take the scenes where Emilia falls for Epifanía or the cast belt out their innermost feelings with their full chest. And of course, there is no singular trans experience that's objectively better or worse than another. Gascón did help shape the role, after all, advising Audiard based on her own life experiences.

What Gascón’s titular performance brings to the film carries a weight both in and beyond theatres. The morning after she triumphed at Cannes back in May, French far-right MEP Marion Maréchal tweeted: “So a man has won best actress,” which led to pushback from multiple LGBTQ+ organisations and Gascón herself who has personally sued her. This time in the spotlight has helped establish Gascón as a vital ambassador for the trans community, reminding us why the film's award potential is still important even if the film itself isn't quite worthy.

To date, nine cisgender actors have been Oscar nominated for playing trans roles, and two — Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club — have even won. In that light, Gascón is infinitely more deserving. But still, it's not good enough.

We shouldn't blindly accept inferior efforts like Emilia Pérez when far superior films such as Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow and Vera Drew's The People's Joker are much more worthy of said acclaim — and that's true even if they don't include a surprise song-and-dance number about "Vaginoplasty".

Emilia Pérez is out now on Netflix.