Lockdown has a lot to answer for. As many were baking sourdough at home, Jacques Audiard, a French film-maker, was writing an opera libretto about a Mexican cartel boss who fakes his own death, undergoes gender-transition surgery and campaigns for the missing victims of the drug war. The resulting film, a trans-narco-musical fever dream called “Emilia Pérez”, has earned 13 Oscar nominations. Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, only three films have received more. No other foreign-language film ever has.
Hollywood is besotted, but audiences are not. Movie-goers’ reviews have been savage. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) it is the lowest-rated Best Picture nominee since 1935, earning a six out of ten. On Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates critic and audience opinions, the public approval rating is just 23%. The nine other Best Picture nominees score between 75% and 99%.
The film’s Rotten Tomatoes rating is down from 75% in December, before it opened in Mexico, where viewers were unimpressed (see chart). Some of this decline is explained by “review bombing”. This can happen when films take on heated subjects. “The Promise” (2016), about the Armenian genocide, saw its IMDb page mobbed with thousands of one-out-of-ten ratings from users in Turkey; in response, most Armenians gave it full marks, resulting in a middling overall score.
But socially conservative Mexicans objecting to a trans woman starring in a film is not the full picture. “Emilia Pérez” is, objectively, poor. The dialogue sounds as if it has been hastily translated from French to English to Spanish, leading to jarring phrases like, “Hasta me duele la pinche vulva nada más de acordarme de ti” (“Even my fucking vulva still hurts as soon as I think of you”). The lyrics have been lost in translation, too. Consider the opening line of one song: “Hello, very nice to meet you. I’d like to know about sex-change operations.” (Somehow “hello” gets one syllable and “change” gets two.) “I see, I see, I see,” is the reply, as perfunctory an iambic trimeter as you will ever hear.
Botched pronunciations have angered Mexicans. Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, was born in Madrid and cannot always hide her Spanish accent. Emilia’s wife with the sore vulva (played by pop star Selena Gomez) sounds robotic in Spanish and slips into English halfway through a line. Adriana Paz, Emilia’s love interest, is the only Mexican in the main cast. She has less than 12 minutes of screen time.
Some also feel the film trivialises the drug war. They accuse it of focusing on one person’s story while ignoring how devastating the cartels continue to be; some 100,000 Mexicans have disappeared or are missing since record-keeping began. Even some trans people are critical. GLAAD, an LGBT+ advocacy group, has called the film a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman”, relying on tired tropes.
Why, given the film’s flaws, does Hollywood celebrate it? Two factors are at work. One is money. Netflix, which bought the film for $12m, has reportedly invested tens of millions of dollars in its awards campaign. This is its tenth attempt at a Best Picture win since “Roma” became the first film on a streamer to be nominated in 2019. (Apple TV+ was the first streaming service to win the top prize with “CODA” in 2022.)
The other explanation is Hollywood’s liberal self-image. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who vote on Oscar winners, put a high premium on diversity. Both “Crash” (2004) and “Green Book” (2018) won Best Picture, despite what critics saw as mawkish takes on America’s race problems. The ostensibly inclusive credentials of “Emilia Pérez”, including a trans lead, probably contributed to its nomination haul. Hollywood’s top brass may want to send a message to Donald Trump and his socially conservative administration. But even Oscar wins are not going to be enough to persuade audiences to sing the film’s praises. ■
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