Emilia Pérez: From Critical Praise to Mexican Criticism and GLAAD Snubs

Emilia Pérez started out receiving near-universal praise for its inclusivity: a musical dramedy with three Latina leads, one of them a trans woman, it earned critical accolades and made history as its four leads — Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz — shared the best actress prize at Cannes. Gascón was the first trans actress to win.

But grumbling about the film's portrayals of Mexicans and its trans protagonist grew louder around the time it won four Golden Globes, including Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy. The wins gave it momentum toward the Oscars, but also put a target on its back.

Emilia Pérez, the story of a male-presenting Mexican drug kingpin who abandons that life to become a crusading woman, drew complaints over its focus on the most violent elements of Mexico, and its filming in Europe, not Mexico, by a French director, Jacques Audiard. Additionally, GLAAD weighed in with a November post calling the film "a step backward for trans representation."

The group pointedly snubbed Emilia Pérez in its nominees for the 36th annual GLAAD Media Awards, announced this morning.

This is the time of year, as we've said before, that Oscar contenders are vetted more exactingly than political appointees. We've written before about the scrutinization of Anora for not using intimacy coordinators, and The Brutalist for using A.I.

The Emilia Pérez criticisms are interesting because what was once seen as the film's greatest strengths — representation — is morphing into complaints about bad representation. Audiard recently offered an olive branch in a recent interview with CNN en Español:

“If there are things that seem scandalous to Mexicans in Emilia, I apologize," he said. "What I want to say is that I’m not even trying to offer answers-cinema doesn’t provide answers — it only raises questions.”

Emilia Pérez Criticisms

One prominent criticism came from Mexican screenwriter Héctor Guillén, who tagged the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the Oscars, after the Globes and published a poster declaring: "Mexico hates Emilia Pérez/ "Racist Euro Centrist Mockery"/ Almost 500K dead and France decides to do a musical."

"There's a drug war, nearly 500,000 deaths and 100,000 missing in the country," Guillén wrote. "We are still immersed in the violence in some areas. You are taking one of the most difficult topics in the country, but it's not only any film, it's an opera. It's a musical. So for us and many activists, it's like you are playing with one of the biggest wars in the country since the Revolution. Part of the plot is about searching mothers of the disappeared: one of the most vulnerable groups in Mexico. And there were zero words in the four Golden Globe acceptance speeches to the victims."

Another critic was Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez, a star of the 2022 Best Picture winner CODA, who said that while he liked elements of Emilia Pérez, he felt it fell short in many ways, including the line-readings in Spanish.

"I told myself, ‘How weird that the director doesn’t speak English or Spanish and the movie is in Spanish and English, and it takes place in Mexico and you don’t understand the culture.’ It’s like if I made a film in Russian without knowing the culture or speaking Russian and talk in French,” he said on the Hablando de Cine podcast.

While praising Gomez in general, he called her acting in the film "indefensible," noting that she is not fluent in Spanish.

Gomez replied on social media: “I understand where you are coming from. I’m sorry I did the best I could with the time I was given. Doesn’t take away from how much work and heart I put into this movie.”

Derbez replied to her reply: “I truly apologize for my careless comments—they are indefensible and go against everything I stand for. As Latinos, we should always support one another. There’s no excuse. I was wrong, and I deeply admire your career and your kind heart."

Imperfection

The film has also fallen into a familiar zone of criticism for almost all films that put underrepresented people on screen: the expectation that they be perfect.

If a film has an all-female cast, it will inevitably be scrutinized for the kinds of women it puts on screen. When In the Heights presented a Dominican-American neighborhood, it was accused of colorism for not having more dark-skinned cast members.

No one expects all-white white movies to properly represent all-white people, because there are so many all-white movies to go around.

Main image: Zoe Saldaña as Rita Moro Castro and Karla Sofía Gascón as Emilia Pérez in Emilia Pérez. Cr. Netflix © 2024.