Gender Bending Mobster Mash

NOTE: This essay contains spoilers.

The rise and fall of Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language movie musical Emilia Pérez must be one of the swiftest turns of the wheel of cinematic fortune ever recorded. On 23 January 2025, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the Netflix-distributed film had been nominated for thirteen Oscars—the second-highest number of nominations in the Academy’s history. The kudos list included Best Picture, Best Director (Audiard), and most importantly, Best Actress for Karla Sofia Gascón. Gascón is a transwoman who plays a cartel lord named Manitas and the titular woman he becomes after faking his death and undergoing a sex-change operation to avoid elimination by his business rivals. Had Gascón won in her category, she would have been the first biological male to carry away a statuette intended to honour female performances.

Instead, at the awards ceremony on 2 March, Emilia Pérez won a paltry two Oscars, both pointedly aimed at Gascón’s costar, Zoe Saldaña, who plays a young Mexico City lawyer named Rita, whom Manitas hires to arrange the legal and medical aspects of his transition. Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress, and a show-stopping number sung by Saldaña won Best Original Song. The film was otherwise snubbed by Academy voters because, on 30 January, just a week after the Academy announced its nominations, it emerged that Gascón had posted a series of very unprogressive tweets in 2020–21. Not only had she criticised Islam in quite strident terms, but she had also expressed her disdain for the canonisation of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in May 2020.

So, Karla Sofia Gascón was duly cancelled. Netflix pulled her from its promotion machine, Audiard publicly suspended all further communication with her, and the Academy decided to advertise its progressive bona fides by rewarding a film about a sex worker instead. Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or winner Anora, which stars Mikey Madison as a lap-dancer and part-time prostitute, walked away with five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (Baker), Best Actress (Madison), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.

This was quite a turnaround. Back in May 2024, Emilia Pérez had received a rapturous reception after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. There, Gascón, Saldaña, and the film’s two other leads—Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz—jointly received a Best Actress award and the film itself picked up the Jury Prize. It also collected four Golden Globes, three Critics’ Choice awards, and two BAFTAs amid a flurry of lesser prizes. The critics mostly raved. “Very rarely does the right movie arrive at precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion appears to be in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated,” enthused Stephanie Zacharek in Time on 13 November 2024 shortly after Donald Trump’s reelection as US president. Emilia Pérez’s theme of gender transition had seemed irresistible, because it combined fashionable feminist notions of “toxic masculinity” with a contrasting portrait of feminine sensitivity. Filled with remorse about the brutal ruthlessness of her life as Manitas, Emilia enlists Rita to help establish an NGO dedicated to locating the bodies of drug-war victims, thereby providing closure to grieving relatives.

Sarah Haji, the journalist who found and posted Gascón’s old tweets on 30 January, has described herself as a “Black Muslim” (she wears a hijab in her X profile pic). “[I] have never seen tweets this racist from someone actively campaigning to win an ACADEMY AWARD,” Haji exclaimed. The tweets certainly displayed a pretty frank animus against Muslims: “[H]ow many times will history have to expel the Moors from Spain,” read the Google translation of Gascón’s Spanish that Haji posted. But these intemperate thoughts also represented an understandable reaction to specific acts of Islamic terrorism in European cities, including a beheading in Nice in October 2020 by an illegal Tunisian immigrant who was already awaiting deportation from Italy. “[T]heir religion is INCOMPATIBLE with Western values,” Gascón had tweeted. She had also called George Floyd a “drug addict swindler,” which was not an inaccurate description, but nor was it likely to endear her to Academy voters.

Around the time that Haji’s revelations appeared, some critics began to murmur that Emilia Pérez was really not a such wonderful movie after all. It might, in fact, be terrible and amateurish, and heaped with prestigious nominations for obviously ideological reasons. The film had bombed in Mexico, where it played briefly during the fall of 2024. It had been shot almost entirely in Audiard’s native France, so the settings didn’t look Mexican to people who actually lived where the story was supposed to take place. Complaints surfaced that neither Saldaña, who is Dominican in ancestry, nor Gomez, who is a second-generation Mexican-American, could speak Spanish with a credible Mexican accent. (The screenplay tries to cover for this by making Saldaña’s character Dominican-born and telling us that Gomez’s character was raised in America. Gascón, a Spanish native and current resident, is more believable because she had had a long career as a male actor in Mexican telenovelas before transitioning in 2018 at the age of 46.) It didn’t help that Audiard knows no Spanish himself and had written his screenplay in French and had it translated. And LGBTQ activists complained that the film promotes a “binary” and stereotyped view of gender identity, despite its lip service to the trans ethos.

In fact, Emilia Pérez is not as bad as its critics now say it is. That doesn’t mean it’s not a bad movie. It’s still pretty bad. Paul Guilhaume’s cinematography, for example, might have snagged an Oscar nomination, but it’s generally mediocre: urban-panorama shots of the film’s shifting locales (Mexico City, London, Bangkok, Tel Aviv, back to Mexico City) that look like stock footage; boxy interior shots (from Audiard’s Paris studio) that look like sets in a filmed stage play; and an impenetrable murkiness in the night scenes that make it hard to see what is going on during the movie’s dénouement. And I don’t really understand why Juliette Welfling received a Best Editing nomination. Was it for the clichéd split screens? Or the jump cuts that suddenly turn sombre scenes of solo introspection into cheery ensemble musical numbers? Or the closeups of Emilia’s long, chorizo-like fingers with their manicured nails filed into icepick points?

Much of the acting is indifferent as well, although that might have been the fault of Audiard’s screenplay, adapted from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute, in which Zoe Saldaña’s Rita was a man. Audiard’s script, or perhaps his direction, leaves most, if not all, of the other characters besides Emilia without much to do. Saldaña’s Oscar-winning musical tour de force, “El mal,” in which she leaps onto tabletops attired in a red velvet pantsuit at one of Emilia’s fundraiser galas and excoriates the businessmen, politicians, and judges for their complicity in Mexico’s deadly drug trade, is indeed impressive. But that’s about all the drama that Rita is given.

Otherwise, she spends the first half of the film sulking that her lawyer job is more worker-bee (her firm’s male senior partner hogs the credit for her courtroom strategies) than advocate for justice (getting wealthy wife-murderers off seems to be the firm’s specialty). In the second half, we find her enriched beyond her wildest dreams by the same drug money (her fee from Manitas) that she deplores in “El mal.” She swans around the world in the glamorous outfits she can now afford, occasionally troubled by pangs of conscience because she has enabled a multiple killer to escape punishment for his appalling crimes.

As for Gascón, she is a tall and broad-shouldered man with a massive jawline as Manitas and a tall and broad-shouldered woman with a massive jawline as Emilia. It’s difficult to find out Gascón’s exact height on the internet, but estimates range from 5’9” to 6’1”—comparable to a female WNBA superstar like Caitlin Clark. But the sheer size of Gascón’s bones, especially in the torso, tends to blot out the light when she shares a frame with the delicately built Saldaña (5’7” by all reports) and/or Gomez (a diminutive 5’5”), who plays Manitas’s wife Jessi. Even—or perhaps especially—when Emilia is padding around her living room in silky kimonos, her long hair arranged in elegant waves and her face adorned with layers of foundation, lipstick, and fake lashes, she always looks a little too scary to be a convincing female housemate. Jessi discovers this after Emilia takes her under her wing and into her house, pretending to be a long-lost cousin of Manitas and auntie to their two presumably fatherless children. 

The music in Emilia Pérez, however, is surprisingly good, even though it is often barely audible (how the movie got a nomination for Best Sound I do not know). And with the notable exception of Saldaña, few of the actors involved in the production numbers can either sing or dance (the group choreography—singing cleaning ladies and so forth—is high-school level stuff). And yet, the tunes provided by Clément Ducol and the singer-songwriter Camille are often sweet, harmonious, and genuinely moving.

In fact, it is the songs, not any particular aspect of Gascón’s performance or Audiard’s screenplay, that transform Manitas/Emilia into a human being with whom we can genuinely empathise. In a pivotal scene, Emilia drops by the children’s bedroom one night in the lavishly appointed villa where they share quarters with Emilia and Jessi. The little boy, Ángel (Théo Guarin), tells “Tía Emi” that he can’t sleep, and when Emilia strokes his hair to comfort him, Ángel tells her, “You smell like mi papá.” And, in fact, Ángel admits that he doesn’t really like the floral perfume with which Emilia douses herself as part of her post-transition femininity. The two proceed to sing a duet, “Papá,” in which the little boy pours out his longing for the father he thinks is dead but intuits is in the room with him, while Emilia pours out her love for the child of her flesh whom she now can’t acknowledge:

He smelled like pebbles
Hot from the sun
He smelled of mint
Mezcal and guacamole
He smelled of dogs on car rides
He smelled of cigar when he hugged us
For the last time
For the last time.... 

The references to “mezcal” and “guacamole” have (naturally!) drawn the ire of Mexican-identity activists for their implication that Audiard derived his familiarity with Mexican culture from restaurant visits. That aside, “Papá” is an emotionally touching piece of songwriting that carries the movie’s action forward—Emilia is now in a pickle with her son’s instinctive and dangerous knowledge of her past identity—and reveals something about its singers’ innermost feelings. In short, it’s not a showpiece like “El mal”; it’s genuinely operatic.

And that, in fact, is the point. Audiard originally wrote Emilia Pérez as an opera libretto. “I wanted to make an opera,” he told an interviewer—and that is exactly what he did, even though the singing is intermittent, to say the least. The film’s structure, themes, and characterisation make Emilia Pérez a direct descendant of the operatic masterworks of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), whose fin de siècle creations mixing high melodrama and luscious melodies—La Bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904)—run tears to this day down the cheeks of audience members, especially female audience members, partly because they are some of the most widely and repeatedly performed operas ever composed.

In Puccini’s operas, the men wage war, make revolution, and create works of art, while the women, who are the men’s wives and concubines (usually the latter), suffer. Almost every Puccini opera ends with the violent death of its lead soprano, usually by suicide but also from grinding and self-obliterating romantic obsession. The seamstress Mimi in La Bohème dies of tuberculosis in a Paris garret after sacrificing everything for the struggling playwright Rodolfo, who is too poor or too feckless to take care of her. Sometimes a child is born to the unfortunate heroine, like Cio-Cio-San’s half-American son who is ripped away from her in Madama Butterfly. These operas are tragedies, because the rash characters trap themselves in situations from which the only escape is death. But they are also sentimental tragedies of feeling. Little children tug at the audience’s heartstrings, and lovers warble ravishing arias as they realise—alas, too late!—that they can’t live without each other. By then, they are unable to save themselves from the fatal consequences of their follies.

And that is Emilia Pérez, which has nearly all the elements of a Puccini smash—the violence, the heartbreak, the doomed lovers, the poignant children. If Ducol and Camille, who are themselves romantically involved, are not quite at Puccini’s level of musical and emotional overwhelming, it is not for want of trying and occasionally coming close.

All Hail the New Flesh

For all its decorative asides about predatory male sexuality, ‘The Substance’ is most coherently understood as a morality tale about the folly of feminist illusions.

QuilletteCharlotte Allen

One of the amusing aspects of Emilia Pérez’s press coverage has been the contortions into which the movie’s promoters and early fans bent themselves as they tried to fit it into pious contemporary locutions like “gender-affirming surgery” and “transwomen are women, period.” Here, for example, is a sentence from Netflix’s online promotional material about the movie:

Through liberating song and dance and bold visuals, this odyssey follows the journey of four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness.

The fourth woman is Epifanía (Adriana Paz), the widow of a Manitas-murdered desaparecido who is actually glad to learn that her abusive husband has been dispatched. She becomes the lover of Emilia, whose interest in the female sex has not waned post-surgery. Then there’s this, from the Movie Gourmet website: “Four women each ache for a fundamental change in their lives...” Both descriptions are ludicrous. The movie loses interest in Epifanía about five minutes after she and Emilia become an item. And as Emilia rushes home to get the children off to school the next morning, we scarcely see or hear from Epifanía again. As for Rita, her main role is as legal and financial functionary and occasional Greek chorus.

Emilia Pérez is actually about only two people: Manitas/Emilia and, to a lesser extent, Jessi, who is a far more interesting character than Rita. She’s essentially a good-time girl who dyes her hair blonde as soon as Manitas’s corpse is presumed to have cooled. One of the first things she does is reconnect with an old lover, Gustavo (Édgar Ramírez), a smaller-time thug who is a handsomer, stupider, and less criminally successful version of Manitas, with whom she was already fooling around before Manitas’s disappearance.

But do not assume for a moment that Manitas, even as Emilia, has surrendered either his alpha status in Jessi’s life or his paterfamilias status as head of his family. When Jessi informs Emilia that she plans to move out of her home to move in with Gustavo—and take the children with her—Emilia screams at her, “Go wherever the fuck you want with your stupid pimp [padrote], but the kids stay here!” Emilia comes close to smashing Jessi’s skull with a lamp base before shattering it on the floor instead. Jessi gives it back with her fists: “And who the fuck do you think you are, you fucking old dyke [vieja lencha]? Do you want me to tell you something about your little whore [putita] too?”

“Old dyke”—really? And Epifanía is a “little whore”? These are not the kinds of pieties we expect to be fed in a critically fawned-over film about LGBTQ issues. Jessi has no interest in NGOs or desaparecidos or the latest political hobbies of the enlightened upper middle class—and nor does Emilia really. What they are both interested in to the exclusion of all else is their unbreakable bonds with the children they have brought into this world. They inadvertently, unconsciously strip away, just as Ángel does in his song about his papá, everything except the fact that they are, in reality, a mother and a father, no matter what other identities they might like to assume.

This means that Emilia and Jessi are on a collision course, the end of which can only be death. There is no point of return for Emilia. Not just because Manitas can’t exactly resurface without having to pay the price for his career of butchery, but because he has made himself into someone who can never again be a husband to Jessi and assume his proper role as head of his family, This is high operatic melodrama indeed, and what follows is even more operatically melodramatic. Jessi runs off with the children to Gustavo’s desert cabin, and Emilia retaliates by cutting off Jessi’s access to Manitas’s bank accounts and credit cards. Gustavo then concocts a hare-brained scheme to kidnap Emilia, hack off her fingers, and ship them to Rita for ransom like J. Paul Getty III’s ear. Rita rounds up some of Manitas’s former sicarios for a rescue, and there’s a shootout at Gustavo’s. Amid the gunfire, the blood, the smoke, and the dust, Emilia and Jessi find each other and sing a duet, Perdóname:

EMILIA:
I met you when you were fourteen years old.
At that time it was with your sister, with Juanita, that I was....
When I was with Juanita it was you that I fancied
And then one day, it was in Azucena in Xalapa,
I kissed you and we went to do the rest upstairs.

JESSI:
You... you kissed me?....
Who are you?
Who are you?...
Manitas....
No, my God, what happened to us?...

EMILIA:
Forgive me! Forgive me!

It’s Rodolfo and Mimi sobbing together on Mimi’s deathbed. And indeed, Gustavo appears, stuffs Emilia into the trunk of his car, and drives off with Jessi in the front seat. She begs him to stop: “In the trunk it’s Manitas, my husband [mi marido]!” She tries to grab the wheel, Gustavo slugs her, she reaches for his gun and shoots wildly, the car crashes off an embankment and bursts into flames, and that is the end of all three of them.

Emilia Pérez isn’t just a revelation about the actual nature of Manitas/Emilia’s and Jessi’s relationship: that they are inextricably bound together as husband and wife—that is, as man and woman—despite all the permutations in Manitas/Emilia’s identity. It is a revelation about what gender transitions may really be behind all the cant. Or at least, gender transitions undertaken in midlife by men, often married fathers whose sexual inclinations remain oriented toward women (post-transition, they identify as lesbians), and who often have had successful careers in stereotypically masculine fields while pursuing stereotypically masculine hobbies on the side.

In that real-life cohort we can count someone like Caitlyn Jenner, an Olympic gold-medalist decathlete named Bruce Jenner during the 1970s and the father of six children by three different wives, who transitioned in 2015 at the age of 63. And economic historian (and high-school football-team captain) Deirdre McCloskey, who transitioned in 1995 at the age of 53 while married and a father of two. And bioscience entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, father of five children by wedlock, adoption, and a nonmarital liaison, who transitioned in 1994 at the age of forty and went on to become America’s highest-paid woman CEO in 2013 while setting helicopter flight records as an avocation. And Joe Biden’s assistant health secretary Rachel Levine, a career medical-school professor and public-health official who transitioned in 2011 at the age of 54 with two children by a since-divorced wife.

The wives of these late-transitioning transwomen either settle into their new Sapphic identities (Rothblatt) or they don’t, with the divorces ranging from reasonably amicable (Levine, Jenner) to catastrophic (McCloskey). We might also add Karla Sofia Gascón herself, who under her birth name, Carlos Gascón, had often played ultra-macho, gangster-like characters, marrying during the 1990s and fathering a daughter in 2011, while continuing, even after his transition, to blast off to media interviews on a 413-pound Yamaha MT-07 motorcycle.

Even Gascón’s politically unacceptable tweets about Islam and immigration in 2020–21 were not out of character for midlife transitioners, many of whom are quite conservative in their politics. Caitlyn Jenner is a lifelong Republican, and the latest high-profile figure to emerge as a transwoman, fifty-year-old economist Jessica Riedl, married and a father of at least two children, is a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. The fictional crime lord Manitas whom Gascón plays in Emilia Pérez really isn’t all that different in his personality and will-to-dominate from these real-life characters who, after decades of pushing ahead in a man’s world, now seem to revel in dresses, makeup, and the side-effects of massive oestrogen infusions—but all the while not changing in the slightest their laser-like focus on the straight line to the top. Emilia simply switches from running a drug cartel with an iron hand to running a social-justice NGO with an iron hand and an additional eye on affording herself maximum public worship.

This is something that the movie recognises. The physician Dr Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), whom Rita locates in Tel Aviv as best qualified to perform the required surgery on Manitas, sings to her—in English—a warning:

Lady, 
You know I only fix the body
Skin, bones, but I will never fix the soul
If he’s a he she’ll be a he
If he’s a she she’ll be a she
If he’s a wolf she’ll be a wolf....

It is Rita, not Wasserman, who has bought into the progressive illusion that a scalpel and a megadose of hormones can actually change one’s sex (or “affirm” it): 

Changing the body, changes Society
Changing Society, changes the soul
Changing the soul, changes Society
Changing Society, changes it all 

Indeed, Rita herself is quintessentially feminine to Manitas’s masculine. She hates having to work as a lawyer, or really, having to work at all: the grind, the plain-Jane career garb, the law-office pecking order. She and a chorus sing:

When are you going to get married? Have children?

I’ve not got the time to have them.

I kept wishing, in fact, that she and Wasserman, who is quite the silver fox, would get something going. Perhaps they will, if there is ever an Emilia Pérez II. 

At some point, while he was writing or filming, Audiard must have realised that the LGBTQ activists who would criticise his movie were right. He really has created, intentionally or unintentionally, a subversive assault on every plank of the current transgender credo—indeed an assault upon the whole edifice of “gender” that is supposed to supplant the biological and psychological realities of sex differences. So, for the ending of his movie, he cooked up, as an audience distraction, a funeral cortège for Emilia that exactly resembles a Latin-American religious procession, complete with Epifanía—remember her?—singing a hymn-like elegy and a statue of Emilia borne on a litter and done up like the Virgin Mary with open hands dispensing graces. (Emilia’s effigy, unlike the Virgin’s, is missing some fingers.) I think we are supposed to take home the message that crossing the gender line really can make you a saint. Or something. Anything other than what Emilia Pérez actually says.