Emilia Perez is a controversial film about organized crime and drug trafficking in Mexico. This movie has been criticized as offensive for its script and its depiction of Mexico.
The movie is directed and written by a French man, Jacques Audiard, who openly admits that he didn’t do research about the country he’s talking about. The movie came out Nov. 1, 2024, and it follows the story of Rita, a lawyer who helps a cartel leader retire from his business and transition to a woman. Audiard decided to make a film loosely based on the book “Écoute” by Boris Razon, which explores themes of loneliness, identity and intimacy in a hyperconnected world, but he had the brilliant idea of making it set in Mexico and about drug trafficking.
He thinks that after visiting Mexico a couple of times, he already understood all the complexity of Mexican’s reality. He is taking the great controversies, dangers, and violent themes to which Mexico must face day after day and selling it like a “broken telephone” for the gringos, or foreigners. It’s as if they could have the Mexican experience without having to get involved with Mexico.
Their representation of Mexico is very disrespectful, even though Hollywood fights hard for accurate representation. But here they are rewarding a film that does the opposite. One of the worst parts is that both the director and Netflix made a strategy to release it first in Europe, the United States, and Canada in order to give it recognition and validity before releasing it in Latin American countries. What angered people was that the movie began to receive awards from the so-called film experts. It is insulting how this is the international film that has the most Oscar nominations in the history of those awards, in total 13.
On top of that, the cast is mostly foreigners to play Mexicans. Audiard said that he considered them better, as if Mexico didn’t have talented actors or actresses, with only one person in the whole cast and crew being Mexican.
One of the things that made the movie get so much attention was the casting of the famous singer Selena Gomez. Maybe for those who don’t understand Spanish her interpretation might’ve been fantastic, since she’s considered of being a “Latina icon” by people in the U.S. The problem is that she plays a native Mexican and Gomez doesn’t even know Spanish, which makes her interpretation taken more as a joke. Since Gomez doesn’t know what the words she’s saying mean, it makes her acting seem plain, with no soul and her character a joke.
The same happened with the casting of Zoe Saldana, whose character is supposed to be Mexican, too. The problem is in that she has a Puerto Rican and Dominican background, and her accent was notable throughout the whole movie. The fact that she didn’t even try to make a Mexican accent either speaks a lot for itself.
The main role was taken by Karla Sofia Gascon, a transgender actress who was criticized since she’s Spaniard, but mostly because she’s known to be very controversial for her ideals and comments that tend to be very offensive to many minorities. The name of the movie’s cartel leader is “Manitas del Monte,” which literally translates to “Mountain handymen,” a nickname for a criminal that only a foreigner who doesn’t know anything about this culture would think of.
This movie was filmed mostly in France despite being set in Mexico; this didn’t sit well with Mexican people. To top it off, it’s a musical, as if the serious and painful issues in Mexico could be captured with little songs and dances. Another fact about this was how bad the lyrics of each and every song in this movie are, as if they were made with AI or just put into Google Translate. None of the songs make any sense, are coherent, or rhyme. They also add Mexican mannerisms that the people who write these songs clearly didn’t even know how to use or what they meant.
I have tried to see it objectively, taking away from the fact that I am Mexican, born and raised in Guerrero. My family and friends have been affected by the subject matter that the film deals with. I have tried to see it in an artistic way and from where I have tried to see it, I think it’s terrible and a giant dwelling over my country.
It is ridiculous and comical that the movie is simply a project that should not have come from the imagination of Audiard. He should’ve had at least a little common decency and tried to do research about the topic his movie would talk about, since it involves real problems.
At a press conference after winning the Oscar for best supporting actress, Saldana was asked about what she thought of the anger and how poorly this film was received by the Mexican audience. She said, “I’m sorry that you and many others felt offended, that was never our intention, … I don’t share your opinion, for me the heart of this movie was not Mexico. We weren’t making a film about a country… We were making a film about four women.”
Her condescending tone when answering the question spoke a lot. Even if she was “right,” some people might say, why did they decide to make it about narco culture? They could’ve based the film in another country.