The world is falling down around our ears more thunderously each day; you could be forgiven, under the circumstances, for thinking nothing very important would happen at the Screen Actors Guild Awards this past Sunday. Almost nothing did. One event of some slight importance that did take place during the ceremony, however, involved Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s controversial drama about three women in the midst of the Mexican drug wars. What happened was that Emilia Pérez took home one prize—Outstanding Supporting Actress, for Zoe Saldaña—but lost in the other two categories in which it was nominated, Outstanding Actress (for Karla Sofía Gascón) and Outstanding Cast. And this result, in the bizarre system of divination that constitutes modern Oscar discourse, suggests that Emilia Pérez has been fatally wounded by the backlash against it and should no longer be seen as a leading contender at next month’s Academy Awards, despite being the most nominated film of the year and an early favorite to bag a heap of trophies.
As far as I’m concerned, modern Oscar discourse can be locked in a heavy safe and dumped into the sea. But the fate of Emilia Pérez—a terrible movie made with good intentions by talented artists, backed by a heavy-hitting Netflix PR campaign—is worth thinking about. Netflix, which distributed the film, undoubtedly imagined it as Oscar bait. But even before the Oscars have aired, Emilia Pérez has become a sort of miserable emblem of the distressed relationship between art, money, and politics in 2025—a relationship that seems almost purpose-built to undermine the good work it’s supposedly meant to foster.
Let’s take this point by point.
Start at the beginning. What is Emilia Pérez?
I mean … what isn’t Emilia Pérez? It’s a crime melodrama. It’s an exploration of trans identity. It’s a depiction of the trauma inflicted on Mexican society by the illegal drug trade. It’s a cri de coeur against Mexican political corruption. It’s a musical (!!). It’s French (!!!).
What’s it about?
The biggest, baddest cartel boss in Mexico, someone responsible for unimaginable death and violence, wants to transition and live as a woman. With the help of a lawyer, played by Zoe Saldaña, the boss stashes a heap of money in Switzerland, gets gender-affirming surgery in Israel, orders up a quick fake death in Mexico, and starts a new life under a new name. That name? You’re never gonna believe this: It’s Emilia Pérez.
So the story is about how Emilia transitions and lives happily ever after?
Not even remotely! Emilia, who’s played by the Spanish actress Gascón—also a trans woman—is much happier after her transition. There’s just one problem. She misses her kids, who think she’s dead. They’re living in Switzerland with their mom, who’s played by Selena Gomez. Zoe Saldaña flies out to retrieve them all and basically says, “Look, now you live with your dead husband/dad’s cousin, who looks quite a bit like him, just go with it.” Emilia buys them a video arcade machine for the living room. They go with it.
So the story is about Emilia’s relationship with her children?
They’re barely in it! Soon Emilia has another problem, which is that she feels guilty about all the people she murdered back when she was the most ruthless criminal in the country, as opposed to what she is now (quite nice). So Emilia founds a nonprofit devoted to helping victims of the cartels. Everything is going great, but then Selena Gomez decides to marry someone else and move out. The dude she wants to marry is played by Edgar Ramírez. They’re going to take the kids to live with them. And, well, we’re now so deep into extreme-spoiler territory that I had better just say this decision leads to a lot of shooting and some infrared-visor-wearing and a not-inconsiderable amount of stuffing people into trunks, and it pretty much doesn’t end well for anyone.
So this is a movie about Mexico?
Very much so.
But it’s French?
Yes. Welcome to Stage One, or what we might call the Airlock Zone of the larger Emilia Pérez controversy-space. The film is set almost entirely in Mexico and its plot concerns some of the most terrible events in modern Mexican history. Yet it was written and directed by a Frenchman, it was filmed on Parisian soundstages, and—while the dialogue is mostly in Spanish—none of the three main leads is Mexican-born or speaks with a Mexican accent.
I mean, it sounds pretty French. I’m not sure it sounds the most French.
It gets Frencher! The story—which, again, is focused on Mexican cartel violence—was taken from the 2018 French novel Écoute, by the French writer Boris Razon, who, and I simply cannot stress this enough, is French.
And this Frenchness is offensive to people?
I mean, look, you cram enough Frenchness into one room, you’re bound to offend somebody. The somebody, in this case, was mostly critics and movie audiences in Mexico, who have accused Emilia Pérez of dealing in stereotypes and exploiting Mexican pain for what basically amounts to a self-indulgent soap-opera narrative—one whose portrayal of the trans experience is clumsy at best.
The Mexican director Camila Aurora—also a trans woman!—responded to the controversy by releasing a parody film, Johanne Sacreblu. Now, I have not seen Johanne Sacreblu. The reason I have not seen Johanne Sacreblu is that I’m afraid it can’t live up to my expectations, and the reason I’m afraid it can’t live up to my expectations is that I expect it to be the greatest film of all time. It features a Mexican cast playing flamboyantly clichéd French characters (curly mustaches, striped shirts, berets) in a tale of doomed romance involving the trans heirs of a baguette company and a croissant company. I think you’ll agree wholeheartedly when I say: YES.
How do you, Brian, feel about the morality of a French film about Mexican narcos?
I can only speak as an American and lifelong Hollywood devotee. I believe artists should be free to follow their imaginations wherever they lead, so long as Nazi officers in World War II movies speak with an English accent.
So basically Emilia Pérez came out and instantly made everyone mad?
Nope. Emilia Pérez came out and cleaned up at the Cannes Film Festival, winning both the Jury Prize and the Best Actress award, which was shared by the female ensemble. (Where is Cannes, you ask?) It then romped through the 82nd Golden Globes, winning Best Foreign Language Film, Best Motion Picture—Musical Or Comedy, and Best Supporting Actress for Saldaña.
It also got 13 Oscar nominations, the most of any movie this year, and the most ever for a film not in English. It was nominated for Best Picture, Jacques Audiard was nominated for both directing and writing, and Gascón became the first openly trans woman to be nominated for Best Actress. Emilia Pérez’s position as a major player in the Oscar race wasn’t hurt by the fact that it was distributed by Netflix, and Netflix has a lot of promotional clout, and Netflix would really, really like to win its first Best Picture statue.
Wait, does that mean this movie is … good?
It’s dreadful.
Can you be more specific?
Look, I’m a longtime fan of Audiard’s work. He’s a storyteller who works without guardrails. He follows his ideas as far as they go, without regard for the consequences. When the ideas are good, the results can be astonishing. The Beat That My Heart Skipped, from 2005, follows a Parisian thug who decides to become a concert pianist; sounds absurd, but the movie’s uneasy juxtaposition of two forms of ecstatic experience, one centered on classical music and one on street violence, is unforgettable. A Prophet, from 2009, imagines a petty convict whose mystical visions help him rise to the top of the prison hierarchy; it’s thrilling.
At their best, Audiard’s films leave you feeling like you’ve gone someplace you’ve never been before. They broaden your sense of the world. But when the initial ideas aren’t good, the same fearlessness that serves Audiard so well on his good days totally betrays him. Emilia Pérez is not just a bad movie; it’s the most extreme possible version of the bad movie that it is. It’s a courageously bad movie. This is not a compliment.
Audiard seems to have been drawn to the story in part from a sincere desire to represent the trans community (more on this in a bit). But he also seems to have been drawn to it because the extreme duality contained in the character of a vicious drug lord who’s remade as a philanthropic nurturer gave him an opportunity to explore themes of rebirth and atonement. Thus, the movie seems to see Emilia’s trans-ness as one-half the experience of a specific person and one-half an abstract symbol, and these two visions are constantly working against each other. You can’t depict the lived complexity of transitioning while also imagining the person who transitions as two separate individuals, one evil and one good. I’m speaking from limited experience, of course, but my own friends who’ve transitioned are still the same people—just happier, because they’re in the right bodies—yet Emilia Pérez seems to see gender-affirming surgery as a magic potion for turning Mr. Hyde into Dr. Jekyll. At the same time, it can’t fully explore its own sin-redemption duality because it keeps suddenly remembering that Emilia has a psychological as well as a moral dimension. And at those moments, the movie will do stuff like—I’m not kidding—write off all the killing as a consequence of gender dysphoria. Which … what?
The movie looks terrible. It feels terrible. The scene-to-scene pacing is choppy and compressed, yet the film as a whole is meandering. The cast is gifted and committed, but because the narrative is so ill-conceived, their commitment is more embarrassing than moving. You keep wishing someone would come in to rescue them from Audiard, or rescue them from themselves.
But it’s a musical, you said? Are the songs good, at least?
The songs are like this:
And look, I too have always wanted to know what a dance troupe of numbly sashaying doctors would look like while chanting “man to woman … penis to vagina” on a set from Men in Black. But to be perfectly honest, the experience was not all I hoped it would be.
And yet critics … liked this film?
In the U.S. and Europe, critics liked it OK. The reviews tended to fall into that lukewarm-leaning-positive register critics adopt when they want to support a movie they didn’t really love as a work of art. But this is where we enter Stage Two, or the Tethered to the Spaceship by a String Zone of the controversy. Because while critics were offering measured praise for the film and awards panels were showering it with nominations—presumably in part to show their support for the trans community—much of the trans community itself was like, Thanks, we hate it.
GLAAD called the film “retrograde” and “a step backward for trans representation.” Queer writers compared it unfavorably to Mrs. Doubtfire. For these critics, Emilia Pérez was—for all its good intentions—just another entry in the long list of movies portraying trans characters as fundamentally deceitful, manipulative, and untrustworthy, and portraying transition itself as a dramatic arc that can end only in death.
So here, on the one hand, you had the entire apparatus of corporate prestige cinema, supported by a PR campaign run by a deep-pocketed streaming company, lining up to reward a film it perceived as nobly progressive. On the other hand, you had the communities actually depicted in the film insisting that it misrepresented and even exploited their experience.
Oh God, that’s such a terrible discourse. That’s as bad as it got, though, right?
It is not. At around this point—and remember that Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, is the first openly trans woman ever nominated for a Best Actress Oscar—people started looking through Gascón’s old tweets.
Oh, noooooooo ...
Oh, yes. If you had “past history of racist tweets” on your Hideous Discourse Bingo card, congratulations! Gascón has a history of racist tweets.
Do we … do we want to ask for an example here?
You don’t, but I’ll summarize. There was a series of anti-Muslim posts spanning more than seven years from 2016 to 2023. There was a racist tweet about George Floyd, the Black man whose murder by Minneapolis police in 2020 led to mass protests worldwide. There was, incredibly, a tweet criticizing the prevalence of work representing marginalized communities at the Academy Awards.
And now we are fully in Stage Three, or the Floating Helplessly Into the Lethal Void of Space Zone of the Emilia Pérez controversy. Gascón apologized; the apology was criticized as superficial and self-serving. Netflix, in a desperate bid to save its golden goose, cut Gascón out of the remainder of its awards campaign. Everyone who has ever come within 500 miles of this movie is mad, sad, betrayed, or disappointed. Many people are all those things at once.
At last week’s BAFTAs ceremony, the British equivalent of the Academy Awards, Emilia Pérez was “snubbed,” meaning it won only two awards from 11 nominations. Voters were widely believed to have turned on Gascón and the film as a whole in response to the controversy—an impression largely confirmed by Sunday’s SAG Awards.
It seems like the story of the production and reception of this film could be taken as a parable for the gulf that still exists between the people who control artistic institutions and those institutions’ audiences.
I just keep thinking about how sad this all is. Trans people are under attack in the United States—by the United States, if the country is synonymous with its government. (Which, God, I hope it isn’t.) Every day brings some new act of cruelty. It would be wonderful to be able to root for a trans actress at the Oscars. It would be wonderful to have a genuinely great trans-focused movie dominating the cultural conversation. Instead, we get this.
We are, in addition, living through a moment when art and artistry are afforded less cultural value than they have been for generations. And whatever else Emilia Pérez is, it’s a film made by artists who clearly believed in what they were doing. They cared about this project. They wanted it to be good. I would so deeply prefer to support those artists than to post snarky memes about the terrible songs they had to sing onscreen. But a bad movie doesn’t become good because its makers meant well, and a bad representation of human experience—of any sort of human experience—doesn’t become good because the motives behind it were honorable. That it was made in good faith may, in the end, be the most unbearable thing about Emilia Pérez.
