The final scene in Emilia Pérez, the controversial musical about a trans Mexican cartel leader, includes the film’s most potentially significant transformation. The camera pans out to show the funeral procession for Emilia (Karla Sofia Gascón), after she dies in a fiery car crash alongside her estranged wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and her wife’s lover Gustavo (Edgar Ramirez). Throughout the film, Emilia atones for her ostensibly violent past by helping families recover some of the media designated- “desaparecidos,” — casualties of drug trade violence. In death she is borne aloft by mourners as a life-sized plastic Catholic Virgin. Led by Emilia’s girlfriend, Epifanía (Adriana Paz), relatives of victims pay loving homage to the tear-stained effigy: “A quién hizo el milagro de cambiar el dolor en oro” (“to the one who miraculously turned pain into gold.”)
Based on an opera libretto written by French director Jacques Audiard, Emilia won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in May, and it has deservedly garnered acclaim for the performances, including Zoe Saldaña as Emilia’s lawyer, Rita, and Spanish telenovela actor Gascón as the title character. (The film’s stars took home a combined Best Actress award at Cannes.) The film is supposed to be a portrait of women living amid Mexico’s violence and femicide crisis.
But as the movie builds up to Emilia’s death as the emotional climax, it loses any subtlety. While the funeral works as a cathartic moment for the audience, it also shows how—rather than encouraging reflection on the inequality that the characters sing about—the film uses Emilia’s journey to paper over them.
From the start Audiard sets us into these women’s worlds ostensibly from their perspective. Rita, Emilia’s self-described “prieta” lawyer, who helps Emilia navigate her medical transition, sings a rock song about corruption and her difficulties climbing up the corporate ladder as a Black Latina woman. Post transition, Emilia falls for Epifanía, the mestiza wife of a man murdered in the drug war. Jessi, a disgruntled gringa, wishes to run off with Gustavo and take her children with her, setting in motion the film’s fiery culmination. These characters promise a complex gaze into the Mexican society the film is set in.
To understand why the film fails, it’s important to acknowledge the determining weight of race and class in Latin America, and the ideology of mestizaje. That belief system is Latin America’s version of “I don’t see color.” Instead it says: “we’re all mixed,” some combination of Black, Indigenous, and European. This helps symbolically unite the countries amid massive racial and class inequalities that benefit a white and white-adjacent bourgeoise. Arguably, mestizaje also helps gloss over societal anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism. Those are precisely some of the marginalizations that render the “disappeared” — often working -class and non-white — an underclass, expendable by violent actors and the state.
From the start, though, the film seems to miss those cultural distinctions. The way race determines class means that Latin America’s cartel leaders aren’t usually blue eyed European descendants. Their distance from that kind of whiteness is part of what shuts them out of opportunities, and is why many of them— from Griselda Blanco to “El Chapo” and Pablo Escobar — turned to violent, underground economies. The potentially nuanced reasons for how or why Emilia rose through the ranks aren’t ever explained or teased out.
Instead of showing us her life through her eyes, the film focuses on her transness, which it turns into a medicalized spectacle. One oddly literal musical number takes place in a hospital where the staff shout out various surgical procedures at Rita, as she determines which doctor would work best for Emilia. Rita is the film’s moral consciousness, but the story is never told from her perspective or about her. Emilia’s girlfriend’s Epifania is similarly flattened. We know nothing about her save her status as a survivor of domestic abuse. And aside from Epifania, the wives and mothers of the disappeared, or the disappeared women themselves, serve only as backdrops.
Tellingly, the most significant plot is about Emilia’s white motherhood. She has two children and sends them to Switzerland with their mother Jessi while she transitions. Then she brings them back to live with her in Mexico City, claiming she is their aunt. At first, Jessi’s portrait as the imported Mexican-American wife, dissatisfied with her expat existence, is a promising plot wrinkle. She longs to run off with the charismatic Gustavo and she wants to take the children with her.
The film becomes invested in the two mothers, Jessi and Emilia, battling over custody. Jessi’s personal desires and vendetta lead her to kidnap Emilia, to enable her escape with her lover Gustavo. The actions are as melodramatic as a telenovela, with Jessi’s character akin to Casino’s Sharon Stone at a Mexican villa. The cliched, binary portrait of the dueling mothers seems intentionally stark to get the audience on Emilia’s side: Jessi is the selfish one taking the kids with her sociopathic lover, and Emilia is the good queer mother, in her reparative cross-class, interracial relationship with Epifania. It reads as a way to redeem her white motherhood before her final sanctification.
Ultimately, before Gustavo’s kidnapping of Emilia goes off the rails, Emilia and Jessi reconcile. Then they die as Jessi battles for control of the steering wheel in the getaway car Gustavo is driving, with Emilia gagged and bound in the trunk.
That final funeral procession and Emilia’s symbolic transformation into a virgin seems inspired by Mexico’s rich history of serenades to and worship of the Virgen de Guadalupe. In turning Emilia into a Virgin the film celebrates her — and her redeemed motherhood.
Guadalupe is an icon of mestizaje: part white and part indigenous, she is a maternal symbol who brings everyone together. And the film’s fuller message becomes clearer as Emilia’s death unifies the women across class and race. Epifanía sings her devotion to Emilia, alongside the other women overlooked by police and government. Rita steps in to take care of Jessi and Emilia’s children: trans-racial adoption as assuagement. The women of color, Epifanía and Rita, are left to provide the emotional work of healing.
Perez’s platforming on Netflix comes on the heels of the Will Ferrell documentary, Will & Harper, another instance of “positive” trans representation that could be seen as an attempt to launder the platform’s anti-trans reputation. But Ii her death allows for her sanctification, the film doesn’t quite know how to represent her life. In a bizarre anti-trans trope, Emilia never fully just exists as a mother. Her kids still “smell their dad” in this aunt; and when Jessi asks to take them, Emilia’s selfish, angry “dad” side comes out (including her old voice). Ultimately, for all the chatter about Emilia Perez’s supposed genre-bending originality, the most compelling trans woman, it seems, is still a dead one.
