As planned, Emilia Perez He began his journey through the awards season with a firm step. The narco musical by Frenchman Jacques Audiard won four Golden Globes and is emerging as one of the favorites heading to the Oscars. Audiard’s film started the night with the highest number of nominations and won best comedy or musical film, best international film, best supporting actress (Zoé Saldaña) and best original song (the evil). The epic period film The Brutalistanother of the strong contenders, won three awards.
There are several galas left in Hollywood. It is very likely that Emilia Perez adds several more awards before its premiere on the screens of Mexico, the country that Audiard says he portrays in the film that was born as an opera in his mind after reading the novel Listen (Listen) from 2018 by journalist Boris Razon.
The musical has been well received by international audiences. Its protagonists, Karla Sofía Gascón, Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, won the best actress award in Cannes. In the United States it has left mixed reviews. Nikki Glaser, the comedian who presented the Golden Globes, said that she never understood what was happening on screen and that when she found out it was a French film she remembered the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Less kind comments have been left on social media. Some have complained about the Spanish of Selena Gomez, the American singer with Mexican roots who plays the wife of a drug kingpin who disappears to change sex and be reborn as Emilia Pérez. The comments seem to ignore a fact: the vast majority of Latinos in the United States have a particular relationship with Spanish. There are millions of people in the country who do not speak it or barely chew it. That doesn’t make them any less Mexican or Hispanic.
The director has also been criticized for not having filmed the film in Mexico or barely using local talent. The exception is Adriana Paz, who plays a woman searching for her missing husband and who maintains a brief love relationship with the main protagonist.
Audiard shot the musical in 49 days in France and just five in Mexico, mostly to capture establishing shots. The director, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes 10 years ago with Dheepanassured in an interview that the Mexican reality is so strong that it only presents you with two options, face it or break it. He opted for the second, naturally.
The aforementioned criticisms can be overlooked. What is truly unforgivable about a filmmaker like Audiard is the frivolity with which he portrays the crisis of violence and missing people in Mexico. These are a mere pretext to advance the characters’ ambitions, no matter how crazy they may be.
It’s not prudery. It is not a rejection of the image that is given from abroad to what happens in Mexico. Violence has been the understandable obsession of many Mexican filmmakers for more than a decade. This has been approached from every point of view and film genre (the musical was missing, that is Audiard’s credit). From Amat Escalante in Heli until the recent Dirtyby Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez.
In Emilia Perez everything is superficial. A great leap of faith is required from the viewer, who witnesses in amazement how a violent drug trafficker is reborn, thanks to his new sex, into a brave activist in favor of the disappeared. In fiction these are products of organized crime. The production seems to ignore that the country has thousands of forced disappearances, at the hands of authorities and the Army.
The film celebrates the liberating power of physical transformation, but is completely crude in its treatment of the protagonist’s moral change. The sensitivity that Audiard used with Tamil immigrants displaced by a conflict or even with the prisoners in his prison drama is missing. a prophet. The Frenchman will not be a prophet in Mexico, the papier-mâché land that he portrays in a musical that sweeps the awards.