Emilia Pérez (2024)

Mrs. Doubtfire meets Sicario, indeed. And especially in the sense that both of these films passed off recycled reactionary cultural ideas as novel and transgressive when they are in fact both out-of-date and insipidly crowd-pleasing.

Oh, what a disappointment. What's so curious is that despite all of the surface noise, given that Emelia Pérez tries to do so much, so much of it comes across as studiously apolitical. Indeed, the press narrative seems to be that the director got the idea from the chapter in Boris Razon’s novel, Écoute, yet it's hard to shake the idea that a narratively and politically conservative 'Mexican trans musical' made by three white cis French dudes was chiefly put into production because as it might play well with liberal audiences' sensitivities to the subject matter.

The film’s regressive politics are everywhere, not just in the way Emilia’s transition is presented (complete with a “woman stares at her new vagina through a pocket mirror” shot that bafflingly comes while Emilia is still bandaged from head to toe after surgery). Any time Emilia “reverts” to her “old ways”, Gascon lowers her vocal register as if to equate masculinity with evil and femininity with good. Men may be no more than props, but no woman’s narrative arc is remotely well-developed, Audiard shrugging aside any attempt at fleshing them out, having them blandly deliver their lines (with poor Gomez unable to finish some of them in her in-film native language of Spanish) until they are disposed of. [Even] if it wasn’t a regressive picture masquerading as progressive, or completely out-of-touch with the sociopolitical reality of Mexico, Emilia Pérez would simply be a boring one and that’s just as much a crime.

— Juan Barquin (Little White Lies)

Emilia Pérez implicitly promises a movie unlike anything you’ve ever seen, and technically, it delivers; I can’t think of another musical movie about Mexican drug cartels and trans issues, and certainly not one that has so little to say about either.

— Jesse Hassenger (Paste Magazine)

As somebody who has devoted a significant amount of critical writing and research to the ways in which culture and politics intersect or clash with trans visibility, I believe that Emilia Perez, in story and framing device, feels out of time, often too distanced to really engage with its eponymous trans protagonist. Its plot, about a Mexican drug lord cutting the line and paying her way to transition, all set to musical numbers, sounds offensive in outline, but even this wild concept can apparently be flattened into an ugly-looking, scattershot bore. To get offended by Emilia Perez would suggest it rose to the occasion to shock and make me feel something. All I felt was every second of its 132 minutes.

— Caden Mark Gardner (Reverse Shot)

I wondered at certain points if the musical numbers functioned at some level as an alibi, to pre-empt objections about being the film being contrived.

— Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)

Even the well-wrought suspense is left in a void; the movie doesn’t offer so much as a glimmer of interest in what Emilia hopes for or fears when she audaciously presents herself as a suddenly prominent public figure. This is all the more depressing because the story is rich in piquant practicalities and symbolic associations—opportunities for imbuing small gestures with vast power, for magnifying the moral challenges and emotional conflicts of daily life, and for expressing philosophical thought in plain and populist terms. [The film] presents twists and turns that exhaust themselves in the strain to stoke excitement; the movie is a wild ride to nowhere.

— Richard Brody (The New Yorker)

One has to wonder why and how this audacious, foolhardy film written by three white French people exists in the first place. There’s nothing insincere about it, but it feels distant from its characters and themes in an out-of-touch way—an earnest movie with no heart, which seems an insane thing to say about a film with a zany song about transitioning.

— Luke Hicks (The FIlm Stage)