Emilia Pérez is a mess of a film – it is also a worrying tale of our time

When the Oscar-nominated lead Karla Sofía Gascón was caught up in a Twitter storm recently she was promptly dropped by Netflix and airbrushed from their Academy Award campaign. But, argues Clarisse Loughrey, there are deeper troubling questions over why it was nominated for so many awards in the first place…

The Oscars are two weeks away. Normally, we’d be watching glamorously attired insiders feverishly compare predictions, their noses pressed up against screens as they watch the Baftas, Screen Actors Guild Awards, and other various pit stops leading up to the moment an industry veteran rips open an envelope and announces our new Best Picture. But, this year, there’s one conversation, and one conversation alone, being had: how do we solve a problem like Emilia Pérez star Karla Sofía Gascón?

At the end of last month, journalist Sarah Hagi unearthed a digital nuke in Gascón’s online history. Tweet after tweet from her X account, dating roughly from 2019 onwards, now all deleted, began to circulate. Each new statement seemed more atrocious than the last. Almost every kind of bigotry was wheeled out (though mostly racism – more specifically, Islamophobia).

Gascón, who pre-Emilia Pérez, had largely only starred in unremarkable parts in Spanish-speaking telenovelas, then embarked on a uniquely unsuccessful apology tour. She delivered the minimal effort, “I sincerely apologise to everyone who has been hurt along the way” statement, before sitting down with CNN en Español anchor Juan Carlos Arciniegas to insist she is “not a racist”, and that “when I have a spider in my house I put a little glass on it so as not to kill it and take it out to the street”.

This was done entirely without the involvement of the film’s distributor, Netflix. Gascón had not only tweeted the indefensible and failed to take responsibility for it – she’d also gone rogue.

Netflix’s reaction was, essentially, complete severance. Gascón’s name and face were swiftly erased from the distributor’s “For Your Consideration” campaign adverts. According to Variety, Netflix also ceased direct communication with the actor (her agent now serves as an intermediary) and rescinded all expenses for travel, accommodation, and styling. She hasn’t been seen at an awards event since. We await to see if she’ll turn up to the Oscars.

Her collaborators quickly distanced themselves: director Jacques Audiard, speaking to Deadline, said, “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to”, while co-stars Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez respectively told Q&A audiences, “it makes me really sad because I don’t support [it]” and “some of the magic has disappeared”. Following Audiard’s comments, Gascón seemed to finally throw in the towel. She declared, in an Instagram post, that, from now on, she’d “let the work talk for itself”.

This sounds solid from anyone who sees cinema as a restorative, empathetic, human art form – and wants to see Oscar nominations discussed on those terms. But, in reality, it is hard to view this as much else than hyperactive damage control.

Netflix put all their energy behind Emilia Pérez. That was their first mistake as this is only the latest chapter in the film’s long, problematic history. It’s also, ultimately, a fairly terrible film. Someone really needs to ask the people at Netflix: is any of this crisis management actually worth it? How did it even end up with 13 Oscar nominations in the first place, one less than the record jointly held by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016)?

Emilia Pérez is a brash musical about a trans cartel leader (Gascón’s Emilia) in Mexico, who enlists a lawyer (Saldaña) to orchestrate her gender-affirming surgeries and ferry her wife (Gomez) and children out of the country so they can all start life anew. It was acquired by Netflix, after its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

The ‘Emilia Pérez’ cast at the 82nd Golden Globes in January (AP)

Here, it received largely positive reviews and won the Jury Prize, plus the Best Actress award for its female ensemble. And it was acquired for one reason only: to win Netflix their first Best Picture since they formally entered the race with 2018’s Roma. Every year since, they’ve acquired a handful of titles per year from respected directors, among them Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro.

It had already been poorly received in Mexico, due to its flippant treatment of drug-related violence, its cultural stereotypes, and its lack of Mexican talent in front of or behind the camera (in the main cast, only Adriana Paz, who plays Emilia’s romantic interest, is Mexican, while Gomez is of Mexican heritage). It was also shot entirely in France. Creator and activist Camila Aurora nicely summarised the nation’s mood when she created the viral YouTube short, “Johanne Sacreblu”, filmed entirely in Mexico City and featuring a cast dressed in striped shirts, berets, and fake moustaches.

Glaad, the LGBT+ advocacy organisation, meanwhile derided the film as a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”, while Drew Burnett Gregory, in a review for Autostraddle, stated: “Certainly, this shallow understanding of trans people can’t still be interesting to cis people. How many times do cis people have to learn about us before a portrayal like this one rings as false to them as it does to me?”

Karla Sofia Gascon has been absent from press events after old tweets were unearthed (AP)

Audiard, it should be said, has previously found success in making films about other cultures in their own languages, specifically his 2015 Tamil-language drama Dheepan. But if you look at the way he approached Emilia Pérez, it’s fairly evident what went wrong. The director visited Mexico but did almost no research. Gascón, reportedly, had significant input into the film’s trans storyline.

In short, Emilia Pérez shows little interest in the authentic experiences it purports to depict. Audiard views his film as opera, his story as one of symbolism and metaphor. Mexico, then, is nothing more than a backdrop of violence, while trans identity is nothing more than a narrative prop for the director to explore his own ideas of rebirth and second chances. It’s neither thoughtful nor tactful – but it at least explains his choices.

I’d argue what attracted those early Cannes critics, and now all these industry early voters, is the veneer of transgression: it looks and moves like a statement movie. There’s a certain relentless to its discordant music (not a catchy chorus in sight and an entire song about vaginoplasty – take that, Wicked!), rhythmic dance, and aggressive camerawork. It’s a movie that screams! About what? Well, if you look at it from far away enough – like the very back of the auditorium – it’s a musical led by a trans woman that Netflix can neatly file away under its “LGBTQ” category and call it a day.

‘In short, Emilia Pérez shows little interest in the authentic experiences it purports to depict’ (PA)

Closer inspection, however, suggests that it’s a mess of a film – and if these media giants genuinely cared about representation they would have written a big, fat check to Jane Schoenbrun, the trans director instead. Her movie from last year, I Saw the TV Glow, is a film of real substance and delivers a story about the trans experience that is honest and daring in all the ways Emilia Pérez is not.

But they didn’t. And that’s because films are made, acquired, and distributed under the same rules that see corporations give their logos rainbow stripes during Pride month. This is performative allyship – signalling one thing, while doing everything else in their power to ignore or silence queer activists.

That’s probably why no one thought to check Gascón’s X account. Publicity teams at Netflix are large and powerful machines. It’s an embarrassing oversight. Hollywood got what they needed from her and never thought beyond that. It was never about truth – just about the showcase narrative. And with Gascón’s offscreen behaviour now threatening the Oscar chances, maybe Emilia Pérez got what it deserved from the beginning.