“Emilia Perez” rings shallow

By Arman Saxena     12/3/24 11:19pm

Score: ★★

France’s submission for the 2025 Academy Awards will likely be the country’s thirty-ninth film nominated in Best International Feature. Currently on Netflix, Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez” follows an overworked lawyer in Mexico who helps a trans cartel boss leave her life of crime and start anew. 

This comedic crime-thriller-musical continues Audiard’s penchant for telling stories of minority groups, such as in his previous films “A Prophet” and “Dheepan”. But unlike those humanist films that intensely honed in on their central characters, “Emilia Perez” falls flat, speeding through character dimensions and motivation for the sake of gaudy musical numbers and a race to the finish line of its 132-minute runtime.

---

---

Zoe Saldana plays Rita, the underappreciated lawyer at the center of the film who struggles towards upward mobility. Even with a script that doesn’t give her much to work with, Saldana is quite good, anchoring the film’s charm, heart and passion. Rita is hired by the notorious cartel boss Manitas del Monte, played by Karla Sofia Gascon, who will likely become the first openly trans performer to be nominated for Best Actress for her work in the film. 

When she transitions, she takes the name Emilia Perez and starts an organization with Rita to help victims of the cartel war. However, Emilia isn’t able to transition to her new life easily and when people from her past enter the picture, things take a turn for the worse. The film’s plot puts Perez through the ringer, and Gascon plays her character’s guilt, regret and pain with precision and ease. 

Selena Gomez plays Perez’s ex-wife Jessi. While Saldana and Gascon aren’t given much to work with in terms of script and character, Gomez is given peanuts. Still, she chews the scenery with confidence, so it isn’t much of a surprise that all three of these women won Best Actress from the jury when the film screened at the Cannes Film Festival back in May.

However, outside of the performances, the rest of the film leaves much to be desired. For a film as flashy and stylized as this, one would think that it would be nice to look at — one would be wrong. Outside of some nighttime shots with ghostly chiaroscuro, much of this film just looks either gaudy or plain boring. 

Additionally, the film’s editing — for which it won Best Editing at the European Film Awards — is feverish for the sake of being feverish and disorients more than it exhilarates. And with technical aspects like these, the audience will share the film’s desire to get to the end credits as quickly as possible.

But over all else, the film’s gestures at social commentary may be its worst crime. 

On the surface, Emilia Perez seems as though it will tackle pressing topics like the sociopolitical climate of Mexico, the trans experience and issues of race and power. Yet, none of these topics are given the space they deserve. At best, they are glossed over with superficial references; at worst, they are presented in a way that feels ignorant and careless, reducing complex lived experiences to mere bullet points in a flashy narrative. 

The film presents the cartel backdrop as an exotic spectacle rather than engaging with the systemic forces behind it, and it treats the trans experience as a plot twist rather than an authentic exploration of identity. Its hollow gestures at deeper meaning ultimately feel exploitative, highlighting the limitations of a filmmaker more interested in sensationalism than genuine storytelling.

In the end, Emilia Perez is a misfire. Despite the critical acclaim it received at Cannes — with an eleven-minute standing ovation that seems more a measure of Hollywood virtue signaling than a reflection of the film's substance — Jacques Audiard’s latest work fails to live up to its aspirations. It's a film that lacks both the heart and the nuance required to tell its story with care or resonance. 

It instead trades depth for spectacle, leaving behind a narrative that’s more interested in the aesthetics of transformation than the genuine emotional journeys of its characters. The performances from Zoe Saldana, Karla Sofia Gascon and Selena Gomez are commendable and breathe whatever life exists into this gaudy spectacle, but ultimately, they cannot save a film that feels so fundamentally hollow. 

Given the Academy’s tendency to reward surface-level prestige over true substance, it’s not hard to imagine Emilia Perez on its way to Oscar glory — but it would be a victory that underscores just how far we still have to go in telling authentic stories about marginalized lives.

---