[CINÉMA] Emilia Perez, by Jacques Audiard: intriguing, ideological and naive

It is sad to note that unlike his late father, the great Michel Audiard, the filmmaker Jacques Audiard refuses to deviate from official morality and seeks at every opportunity to please his era. It is his personal quest, his obsession. As evidenced The Olympicsa highly sensationalist film, released in 2021, in which the 69-year-old director celebrated with greedy enthusiasm the libertine hedonism and the sex life of the most lost Parisian youth.

Audiard, however, does not lack talent, he proved it with his first films: Watch the men fall, On my lips, My heart stopped beatingor even the very ambiguous A Prophet. We were therefore curious, despite everything, to see his new feature film, Emilia PerezJury Prize at Cannes in this year 2024.

The film tells the story of a young lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldana), approached by a powerful Mexican cartel leader, Manitas (Carlos Gascón), who wants to “transition” and become a woman. To help him in his project, Rita secretly agrees to approach specialized clinics around the world and to cover up her fake death from her loved ones. Four years later, Manitas, under the name of Emilia Perez, decides to contact the lawyer again so that she can help him find his children who he misses. The former crook plans to reconnect with them by pretending to be a cousin of their late father. An initiative that could well lead to some complications and get him into trouble.

The moral of the story

Moral of the story: yes to sex change, but never look in the rearview mirror…
Like many other filmmakers before him – François Ozon comes to mind – Jacques Audiard delivers his “queer” film and in turn presents us with a plea for the most total subjectivism: basically, I am what I believe I am, or would like to be. An existentialist reasoning, problematic in society when it comes to defining things or beings, whereas until now, science and biology served as objective criteria to bring everyone into agreement. This frenzied subjectivism of transsexuals, according to many specialists, very often reflects a personality disorder, a self-loathing pushed to the extreme; which sheds light on the alarming statistics concerning them (40% of trans people have attempted suicide at least once in their lives).

Thus, without realizing it, Audiard encourages self-hatred in people who are suffering and uncomfortable in their own skin, and gives credence to the naive idea that surgery and cross-dressing are enough to change sex. Basically, the feminine is only a matter of subjective personal consideration and aesthetics – women will appreciate…

Trans and charitable – of course

Furthermore, this chimerical change of sex seems to complete, by the magic of the scalpel, a change of mentality in Manitas/Emilia Perez who, not content with suddenly finding himself exonerated of all his past crimes by a complacent scenario, actually launches an NGO to defend victims of drug trafficking (!) – one could not find a better illustration of the progressive ideology of the blank page and the rewriting of oneself. We note in passing that Manitas wants to change sex but that, having become a “woman”, he spontaneously returns to his masculine reflexes (love of a woman and use of violence to resolve conflicts…).

In a clumsy way, Audiard tries to make us digest this collection of clichés about Mexico (where he didn’t even bother to film) and trans-identity clichés (promoting nothing less than lying to oneself) through the form: a musical with failed songs, often inappropriate and poorly interpreted. One can also question the relevance of making a glamorous musical about a criminal milieu that, since 2006, has already claimed 450,000 victims – or when bad taste turns into moral failing…

Emilia Perez is certainly an intriguing film, virtuoso in its staging and visual choices, but of a confounding naivety. Its glowing reviews can only be due to the ideological commitment of their authors.

1 star out of 5