I opted to stay in this weekend, but there was still one Oscar nominee I could see: Emilia Pérez on Netflix. Now, I come into this one knowing it’s controversial nature. The lead actress had to apologize for old racist tweets. A supporting cast member got involved with the American deportation controversy on social media. And, perhaps most telling, a whole lot of people don’t seem to even like this movie. Personally, I had barely heard of it before it got any nominations, and what I’ve seen since then is a lot of people wondering why it’s up for as many awards as it is. While Emilia Pérez is hardly the first controversial nominee, it appears this time around the controversy is due to the movie’s quality and not some political reason.
That last reason is why I decided to watch it. I mean, I sat through Megalopolis. I am pretty sure I can take what this movie throws at me.
I’ll say this much for Emilia Pérez: like Megalopolis, it’s ambitious if nothing else. It’s an odd duck of a movie from the opening scenes as downcast Mexican lawyer Rita Mora Castro (top-billed Zoe Saldaña) finds herself getting a mystery call from a mystery client. She opts to follow up and is then kidnapped by shadowy figures, and when she meets the man behind her kidnapping, she is essentially told that if she hears what her potential new client’s business is all about, that she must take the man on as a client. Said man is the notorious drug kingpin Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), and he has a mission for Rita: find a doctor to finish Manitas’s sexual reassignment surgery, and this doctor better be the sort who can keep their mouth shut. Rita does find a doctor to do the surgery in secret, but in the meantime, Manitas has to set his wife and children up somewhere safe as he has many enemies, and after the surgery is over, he’s going to fake his own death. Yes, he won’t be telling his American-born Jessi (Selena Gomez) or his two sons what’s going on, but will merely be setting them up somewhere safe.
Four years later, the rechristened Emilia Pérez finds Rita in London with a new request: help her get her family back. Posing as her own cousin, Emilia has her ex-wife and two sons move into a large mansion. Much of this requires Rita to do more and more for Emilia, especially as she finds herself helping people from across Mexico find their loved ones who were taken and murdered by the cartels that she used to run and compete with. Jessi, meanwhile, hooks up with old flame of her own, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez), a prospect that does not bother Emilia right away until the idea that Jessi will marry Gustavo and take the children away rears its head. Oh, and this whole movie is also a musical.
Yeah, it’s a lot.
Emilia Pérez is many things. I don’t think many of them are good. There’s a lot happening here, and very little of it seems very deep. I mean, at least one YouTube critic I found suggested one plot had been taken from the Robin Williams comedy Mrs. Doubtfire, only played a lot more seriously, and I am hard-pressed to say it’s wrong. For the most part, the movie feels very superficial to me. Sure, there are a lot of potentially crazy plot twists, but none of them feel all that deep. And with as many plot points that come into the movie–I didn’t even mention that Emilia gets a girlfriend at one point–there’s just too much plot and not enough time to do those plotlines justice in the end.
I think the biggest issue for me is the treatment of Emilia as a character, one that is characteristic for every main character as a whole. Is it possible that the surgery can make Emilia a better person, a debate that happens (in song) between Rita and the transphobic doctor that eventually does the surgery. It is true that Emilia is a much better person post-transition, but then there are moments when her old self re-emerges, and I am not sure the movie really knows how to square that circle. Is Emilia a better person? Was she good all along but just miserable because she was the wrong gender? I don’t know. And for me, it doesn’t work that well.
Grade: C-
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