Emilia (Pérez) in Paris

Comment: a French director has committed a cultural crime against Mexico, writes Georgina Jiménez

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There is an old adage: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, and this seems to be the premise (or excuse?) of Jacques Audiard in Emilia Pérez—a film clocking up nominations faster than a drug mule in the Hollywood imagination can cross the border while dodging bullets.

With its deranged message of redemption through the embrace of diversity—and annoying even more people than Emily in Paris—Audiard’s “musical thriller” toys with the incredible but true tale of “El señor de los cielos” (“The Lord of the Skies”), aka Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Carrillo Fuentes was head of the Juarez cartel until 1997, when he died due to complications during an operation in which he was receiving cosmetic surgery to change his identity.

Carrillo Fuentes himself achieved a form of immortality on the silver screen with his own 2013 television story and in the Netflix series Narcos, as well as popping up posthumously to haunt a host of lesser TV efforts growing fat on US and European viewers’ ill-informed fascination for the exotic world of Latin American drug trafficking.

Emilia Pérez is nothing if not proof that in popular culture outside Mexico, such tawdry cartel-mania is alive and kicking as consumers are force-fed the lazy stereotypes that non-Mexican cinema snake-oil sellers with an eye for a quick dollar turn into hard cash.

But Audiard’s gambit—and, like the roll of a loaded dice by a capo on holiday in Vegas, that is precisely what Emilia Pérez is—is far more bizarre, unexpected and undeserving than anything about Mexican drug-traffickers that we have hitherto been exposed to.

In short, this movie tells us far more about the twisted tastes, perverse expectations, and sheer, unadulterated ignorance of a mediaverse spanning the Euro-American Atlantic that routinely spews out toxic narratives about Mexico than it does about the country itself.

We must read Emilia Pérez not for what its content says about a conflation of the characters of the likes of Pablo Escobar, El Chapo Guzmán and Carrillo Fuentes—which is absolutely nothing at all—but for what it says about the sentinels of the cinema industry in France, where the film originated, and the US, where it is aimed.

Let’s start with France which, we must not forget, has form when it comes to cultural imperialism, indeed imperialism of the old-fashioned, muscular 19^th-century variety that seems to be making a comeback.

Not content with its first intervention in Mexico in a bizarre but very French dispute over pastries in 1838, it later did a Putin with a full-scale invasion under Napoleon III in 1861.

France would stay and rule Mexico for five years—slightly longer than it took Audiard to make Emilia Pérez. The French director spent over four years re-assembling this two-hour waste of Einsteinian space-time from something on the slush pile originally scripted as an opera.

French stereotypes of Mexicans have been, since the dawn of diplomatic relations between these republics, shaped profoundly by a sense of racial superiority. In recent years, egged on by the US Drug Enforcement Administration, French security forces have gone further, turning Mexico and the influence of its cartels into a convenient scapegoat for their own failure to tackle organised crime. Contemporary politicians routinely use the phrase “mexicanisation” to refer to the extension of criminal organisations in the country.

All these crude stereotypes are on display liberally in Emilia Pérez, which as one social media user posted after its triumph at the Golden Globes is “a racist, xenophobic mess with awful Mexican representation made by a French director who didn’t even bother to research our culture.”

As for US stereotypes of Mexicans—about which much has been written and said—these continue to distort psyches at the highest echelons of power and have exerted a profound and enduring influence upon mutual relations.

They are summarised well by the Jim Crow Museum: “The stereotypical depictions of Mexicans, especially those thought to be in the United States illegally, are harsh and demeaning. The men are portrayed as illiterate criminals. The women are depicted as hypersexual. Both men and women are portrayed as lazy, dirty, physically unattractive menaces.”

The tragedy of Emilia Pérez, then, is that it represents just the latest shameless, amoral effort to monetise such toxins for box office success, while compounding its crime against culture by adding transphobia to its list of nefarious hang-ups.

As a tale of transgression and diversity, it is visually pristine and colourful, grappling with a theme that seems to be the common thread in all of Audiard’s previous films: “I can change from who I’m supposed to be into who I was meant to be”, and the importance of learning from mentors on the journey to self-discovery.

The subjects of Audiard’s other films are a Chinese teacher unable to speak French who teaches a French man how to achieve his musical potential (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), and a deaf woman teaching a petty thief how to fit into society who, in reward, is inspired by the criminal to experience the love that others deny her (Read My Lips).

But as a modern morality tale with a touch of Hollywood lip-gloss, Emilia Pérez is not just a wasted opportunity—it is not even an opportunity in the first place.

The main character, played by Zoe Saldaña, is a female lawyer who cannot escape a life of spin and corruption, trying to clear her client’s dirt through “clean” actions. She enables the transition of a ruthless narco (Edgar Ramírez) into a canonised benefactress (“La tía”, played by Karla Sofia Gazcón), and in the process, the lawyer’s character is lost.

The relationship between lawyer and client confirms what we all know: life is messy. But ultimately the plot of Emilia Pérez is even messier.

It is a shame that this film has neither the brilliance of Audiard’s first two movies—which, after all, he directed in French for French speakers—nor demonstrates the care he put into these. Its carelessness shows.

Was he aiming just for the average American audience, too familiar with the ideas of men whose masculinity is sexually dubious and therefore “morally” questionable and women who are rampant between the sheets, unfulfilled or masculinised figures?

Any redeeming intention to show trans people in a favourable light and Gazcón’s acting efforts are lost in the use of Latino stereotypes and a narrative that paints trans people in a reductive light.

As quoted by Emilia Pérez’s surgeon in a shockingly out of context musical number, the film’s message appears to be: “I only fix the body but will never fix the soul, if he is a he, she’ll be a he… if he is a wolf, she’ll be a wolf”.

This begs the question of why someone with the financial resources of a cartel leader (with a soft woman’s heart, however) would settle for a surgeon who doesn’t believe trans people exist.

The celluloid alchemy does not work here. The process of purification or refinement does not act in the same way as in Audiard’s previous films. Instead, the viewer gets an absurd vision of what Mexican people are and respect. Presumably the director thinks they are easily pleased or don’t have the capacity to see for themselves the violence perpetrated by the drug trade or those who hate marginalised genders.

This is merely a colourful Mexique universe, where the array of accents are not even regional, let alone the mother tongue. Before the character’s transition Manitas (Ramirez) has a strong Venezuelan accent and, bizarrely, a Spanish one afterwards (did the surgery include a brain operation too?).

Selena Gómez’s has at least an affinity with Mexico’s cultural background, but would have benefited from elocution lessons to match her character. The only one who makes an effort to cover these linguistic flaws is Saldaña, of Dominican origin, who is able to remain in character.

Why such a large production betrays such a lack of basic research and consideration for its audience—or did not source local talent—is beyond belief.

Add to this the random syncopated Hamiltonian tones of the musical numbers, which in isolation could be enjoyable, but neither enhance the plot nor even flow with the script.

And what of the long-suffering Mexico itself? Is Audiard trying to make the point that the country would rather accept substitute “justice” served up by repentant criminals—such as Manitas—than be deserving of the “real” justice its people crave?

It is astonishing how in Audiard’s movie—supposedly centred around the struggles of women—he misses the mark so far. He suggests that a woman must disappear into the abyss of male games or that by changing one’s sex an individual’s life can be completely rewritten, transforming them into a woman who will comfortably be accepted and fit into the existing stereotypes of the gender binary.

Meanwhile, in Mexico, disappearances and femicide are at all-time high -and LGBTQ women are particularly susceptible to such violence.

Audiard, for his show-stopping musical soapera, conveniently chooses to neglect this issue in favour of the tale of a redeemed black sheep helping the poor find their lost sons.

There is no doubt that this year you will be unable to ignore Emilia Pérez—all the signs are that it will be pushed harder down your throat than a stale burrito—but you have the human right to ignore it.

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