Welcome to How Gay Is It?Out's review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: this post contains spoilers for Netflix's Emilia Pérez.)
You’ve never seen a movie like Emilia Pérez.
Writer/director Jacques Audiard brings a bold new take on what could be a cliché and trope-filled transition narrative that ends up being one of the best and most unique films of the year.
Emilia Pérez stars Zoe Saldaña as Rita Moro Castro, a hard-working but unappreciated lawyer working in Mexico who is approached by a notorious crime lord, Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, who wants Rita to help fake her death and arrange a variety of surgeries so that she can transition and live as her true self, the titular Emilia.
A few years later, Rita is roped back into Emilia's world when she wants to be a part of her ex-wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and children's lives. With Rita's help and posing as Manitas' sister, Emilia gives Jessi and the children a mansion to live in in Mexico and starts a foundation to find the bodies of people who have gone missing due to cartel violence.
Emilia meets and falls in love with a new woman, Epifanía, whom she meets at her foundation, and experiences true happiness for the first time. But can she overcome her past? Will a wolf always remain a wolf?
At once a transition narrative, crime thriller, musical, and romance, Emilia Pérez is a Shakespearean-level tragedy that grapples with questions of love, identity, forgiveness, and grief.
Even though it ostensibly tells a very stereotypical story of a trans woman undergoing transition, how hard it is on her family, and the tragedies that result, it in no way revels in those tropes or feels clumsy or backward in its treatment of trans women. As a trans woman, I usually hate these tropes, but here, I never once was bothered.
This film reminds me a bit of Brokeback Mountain in that way. On paper, it seems like the exact kind of trauma porn gay audiences are tired of seeing, but on screen, it is one of the best queer movies of all time. Emilia Pérez expertly shows how cis filmmakers can tell trans stories without being held back by transphobic tropes and clichés.
This is a story about ambiguity in grief. Emilia convinced her family and empire that she died when she transitioned, but they never had a body and never were able to grieve. In poetic response, she starts a foundation looking for bodies of murder victims that have never been found. This becomes one of the central themes of the movie.
One of the oldest trans tropes is acting like a trans person's pre-transition self is dead. But this movie posits that when a trans person transitions, they’re still the same person and not dead at all.
Emilia can't leave her former self behind. Despite her huge changes, she's not completely different. Emilia is still jealous and possessive. She likes to make the rules, and when someone doesn’t follow them, she’s still not against resorting to violence. In the end, this is her downfall. And in the end, it results in her actual death.
While the film is full of tragedy and ends with the death of the titular character, it in no way treats transition as something to be afraid of. Emilia did not die because she transitioned or because she's trans, she's a trans character who is allowed to die in order to tell a beautiful story.
Once Emilia has recovered from her surgeries, her transition isn't really a factor for the rest of the film. She enters a lesbian relationship with a woman she meets at her foundation, and her transness is never an issue. Jessi and her children accept her as their aunt and never once question her gender. We don't linger on that aspect of her life.
The film also approaches the subject of transition with humor, levity, and curiosity. We're treated to a wonderfully bizarre song where Saldaña gets to sing "vaginoplasty, mammoplasty, rhinoplasty" while learning about what procedures her client will undergo. There are also several trans jokes throughout that made both me and my trans fiancée laugh.
Partially because it's a musical, some of the more complex feelings behind being trans are a little flattened (Emilia sings about feeling like "half man, half woman"), but those don't feel bad or too cliché in the musical format where complex emotions are expressed in rhyme and analogy.
The film's true highlights, though, are the lead actresses, who truly deserved their Best Actress wins at Cannes and deserve every other award coming their ways.
Saldaña is a powerhouse of a lead, driving the film forward (with backup dancers following closely behind). It’s the performance of her career.
Gomez also delivers. She’s perfectly cast and nails the assignment as the drug lord's wife who longs for love and a glamorous life.
But it's Gascon who really deserves an Oscar nomination. Playing both Manitas (under a layer of prosthetics) and Emilia, she reaches deep into her soul for this performance. By having a trans woman play herself before transition, you actually have her putting back on the costume of manhood, and as a result, the scenes are uncanny.
When she’s Manitas, there’s a deadness behind the eyes and voice and movements that hammers home that Emilia is who she truly is. When she becomes Emilia, she's an unstoppable force, standing up for what she believes in, taking what she wants, and yearning for what she thought she could never have.
Emilia Pérez isn't just one of the best trans movies you'll ever see, it's one of the most unique and brilliant films of the year.
But how gay is it?
Emilia Pérez features possibly the best trans lesbian romance I've seen in a movie. The love story between Emilia and the fittingly named Epifanía feels like a breath of fresh air and adds a layer of softness to a tragic film. While it's not the main focus of the movie, the film still gets four and a half out of five stars and five out of five eggplants.
