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With “Emilia Perez”, Audiard defends a “transgender film” at the Oscars
As the Oscar nominations approach, director Jacques Audiard returns to “Emilia Perez”, his “transgender film” about a Mexican drug trafficker who becomes a woman, and gives his thoughts on the American film industry faced with the Los Angeles fires. Angeles. Jury prize at Cannes and awarded four Golden Globes, including best comedy and best supporting actress for Zoe Saldaña, “Emilia Perez” is among the contenders for the Oscars, where its broadcaster Netflix pushes it into all the major categories, including best film. “It’s a film that was shot in Paris, speaking Spanish. It’s a bastard film,” laughs the 72-year-old filmmaker during an interview given to AFP at the Bogota Cinematheque. Cap, sunglasses and leopard-print shirt matching his shoes, the director explains the genesis of his work, a surreal musical comedy narrating the repentance of a powerful Mexican drug lord who orchestrates his disappearance to realize his deepest aspiration: to become a woman, Emilia. Finally free to be herself, the ex-criminal sets up an association to help victims of drug trafficking. She also reconnects with her wife and children, who believe she is dead, by pretending to be a distant relative. “It’s a transgender film” because it “crosses different genres”, underlines Jacques Audiard. “It seemed to me that the film had to change genre, like the main character and like all the characters.”- Narcoculture -Already rewarded with several awards, the film divides in Mexico, the country that inspired him. Criticized for its lack of rigor on sensitive subjects such as the missing and violence, it is also criticized for having favored filming in studios in France and for having only one Mexican actress in its cast. The film is the fruit of a “sociological, criminal documentation” of more than four years, with dozens of interviews, affirms its author, who however denies having wanted to make “a documentary”. “The work of adapting to the cinema was very long,” he explains. Before “Emilia Pérez”, Jacques Audiard had thought in 2016 of “making a musical about narcos in Colombia”, the largest producer of cocaine in the world. The director of “A Prophet” (2009), a film which already touched on the theme of drug trafficking, however rejects any “fascination” with the representations of drug traffickers. “I can’t stand all the attacks on democracy. Narcoculture is an attack on democracy,” he says. “What I felt in South America, in countries like Mexico, is the social and human drama.” that drug trafficking creates. “People have disappeared, we can’t find them. That’s what touches me.” – “New models” -The announcement of the Oscar nominations will be made online on Thursday, after two postponements due to the flames that devoured part of Los Angeles since the beginning of January, killing at least 27 people. These fires are a hard blow for Hollywood and its already struggling film industry. Actors, screenwriters and producers saw their homes destroyed by the flames, film and television productions were temporarily suspended. Asked about the Oscars, the director estimated that “with what happened in Los Angeles, the great difficulty that they (the Americans) must experience at the moment, they will have, in my opinion (…) to play local. They will have to reassert themselves or regain confidence. This will probably happen through their cinema. “I believe that the American industry needs new models”, far from blockbusters, confides Jacques Audiard, whose filmography gives pride of place to marginal characters.lv/pld/esp/lpa
