There’s three ways to make a movie with the focal point around a transgender person – the good, the bad and the ugly.
In 2018, A Fantastic Woman won the Best Foreign Language Oscar and it focused on the life of a woman who was the partner of a deceased older man and became criticized and even threatened by the family and friends. Then, you have Walter Hill’s The Assignment in which Michelle Rodriguez plays a professional killer who gets gender reassignment surgery to hide their identity. I haven’t seen it but given Hill’s questionable past, I’m sure he doesn’t present it in a positive life.
Then, there’s Emilia Perez. It’s not good. It’s not ugly. But it is bad. The problem is that it’s all over the place with a foolishly outrageous premise that wouldn’t make sense no matter when it was released. It doesn’t help that it is considered a French movie with mostly Spanish language but it’s supposed to be about Mexican people who don’t use the appropriate Mexican dialect. Also, it wasn’t filmed at all in Mexico but parts of Paris.
So that means, most exterior scenes we see portray Mexico in a very scuzzy look. Robert Rodriguez has been able to show the pure beauty of Mexican towns and cities. I remember years ago I went to a Mexican restaurant about 15 miles from my house and saw a wonderful town square of an Mexican town on a sunny day where the restaurant’s owners were from. I told the cashier that I had only been to Juarez and he said, “Oh, that’s not true Mexico.”
Mexico has been portrayed so negatively in the media mostly in the news that most of the exteriors are either in poorly lit locations mostly at night in desolate areas. Maybe it’s because Jacques Audiard, the writer/director of the movie, decided he didn’t want to film at all in Mexico, pulling a Stanley Kubrick and refusing to go across the pond. But sometimes, it’s easier to forgive a movie that is a musical because you don’t need to much reality because people are constantly breaking out in singing and dancing.
But it’s the singing and dancing that seems out of place for a movie that flip-flops between serious elements and non-serious elements. I really couldn’t tell who was really the main character of this movie. Despite the title, it seems to be more about Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldana trying her best) a lawyer who is mostly forced against her will to help assist a drug cartel kingpin named Juan “Manita” Del Monte (Karla Sofia Gascon) to undergo gender-reassignment surgery to become a woman to hide his identity.
It would take a good filmmaker to walk the thin line about this subject matter. Normally, people who transition have to go through a long, lengthy process of mental and physical examinations. Despite what conservative and Christians think, it’s not the type of thing that can be done in a few hours. It takes a few years. The fact that the movie uses transitioning as a trivial plot point like this is insulting. At no time does Del Monte/Perez ever talk about gender dysphoria.
I can only assume Audiard was influenced by the true-life case of drug cartel kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes who died in Mexico City on July 5, 1997 in a hospital from complications from cosmetic surgery. This has been referenced in both the 2000 movie Traffic and Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico.
My main problem with the movie is there really is no true character arc for when Del Monte, who seems a run-of-the-mill Latino drug kingpin, to turn into the more sensitive and considerate Perez. It’s just one of those time jumps that happens without any real explanation. And suddenly she arranges for Rita to move Jessi from Switzerland to Mexico City with the children. Suddenly, upon seeing her children, Perez is now a different person who decides to start a non-profit to help identify the bodies of cartel victims.
I never did really buy it. And neither will some of you. The tone of the movie keeps changing between the silly musical sequences in which Rita goes through a futuristic looking operating room where she discusses with a Thai surgeon vaginoplasty and reduction of an Adam’s apple to gruesome scenes of amputated bloody fingers and people being roughed up.
It also doesn’t help that Gomez must’ve thought she was doing a comedy because her performance is so over-the-top. There’s also a glamorized cameo of Edgar Ramirez as Jessi’s lover Gustavo Brun playing his character as Rico Suave meets Tony Montana. And Gascon shows promise in a role that would’ve been better if it was written better. However, her past social media tweets have come back to ruin her Oscar chances as well as for the movie itself.
People have been drawing comparisons to the 2005 Crash movie, which won Best Picture over the critics’ darling Brokeback Mountain, which now seems very dated like Chasing Amy. There’s been a lot of backlash against Emilia Perez over its portrayal of Latinos in typical stereotypes as they’re either involved in drug trafficking or living in slums or poverty. While other transgender actresses such as Laverne Cox and Patti Harrison have been able to appear in roles in movies and TV shows where there is no need for their transitions to be relevant, there’s still the feeling this movie perpetuates a stereotype of transgender women.
Subject matter alone is not enough to warrant praise and excellence.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 