‘Emilia Pérez’: It’s Better To Drown Yourself Than See It

I try to keep abreast of the various movies that are nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, even though there hasn’t been a solid winner in the Oscars for years at this point. 

This year, the frontrunner is a movie titled “Emilia Pérez,” which was nominated for 10 Golden Globes. It won four.

It is one of the worst movies ever made. It is horrible in every way possible for it to be horrible.

I’m going to break down this review into a few categories. First, we’re going to go through the actual movie plot, the performances, and the music. Then, we’ll get to the blowback.

The premise of this unbelievably stupid, insulting, and morally vacuous film involves a gangland drug leader, played by Karla Sofía Gascón, who is a trans woman, which is to say, a man. In real life, Gascón identified as a male until his mid-forties. In 2018, at the age of 46, Gascón decided that he was, in fact, a she and decided to go through all of the various surgeries to make him look more like a her. 

I would say rather unsuccessfully.

In this particular story, Gascón plays a Mexican drug lord, the head of a deadly drug cartel who decides he does not just want to disappear, but also wants to become a woman. He’s apparently always wanted to be a woman. The lawyer he ropes into this game is Rita Mora Castro, played by Zoe Saldana, who will help the newly-named Emilia Pérez become a woman.

The basic premise of the film is reliant on one essential idea about life. If you don’t buy into this idea, the entire movie is actually quite evil. That idea is: If you cut off your genitals, this makes you a better person. The basic premise of the film is: If a genocidal, murderous drug lord wants to feel like a woman, undergoes many surgeries and hormone treatments, that person is to be treated as a feminist saint after emerging on the other side.

Without that crazy perspective, none of the movie works and the whole tale becomes rather sinister.

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Now, you may be saying to yourself, this sounds like a comedy. If you watch the film as a comedy, it is uproariously funny, since none of it follows. It makes no sense. All the things that are supposed to be serious are hilarious. It is one of the most ridiculous movies ever filmed.

This drug lord is married to a character played by Selena Gomez, legitimately one of the worst actresses alive. Inanimate objects have more affect than Gomez.

The transgender woman’s lover, played by Adriana Paz, is a person named Epifania.

The drug lord’s wife and two children move to Switzerland with the drug lord’s money. Four years later, the drug lord, now a transgender woman, approaches the lawyer and says, basically, “I would like to get in touch with my kids again, so I’m going to pretend to be my cousin living in Mexico. I’m going to pay my ex-wife and the kids” — the wife thinks he’s dead at this point —  “to come live with me in Mexico.” Complications ensue because it turns out the wife has a lover. And not only that, but so does Emilia Pérez. At this point, he falls in love with a woman. 

All of this comes as the lawyer and Pérez decide that not only is it time for Pérez to return to Mexico as a woman, but it is also time for Pérez to become an extraordinarily high-scale public figure who uncovers all of the bodies of people murdered by drug cartels. At no point, by the way, does this drug cartel leader actually apologize to anyone for having murdered humans.

Instead, this person just traipses around explaining that it’s very bad to kill people and bury their bodies in unnamed places and so on. By the end of the film, the drug cartel leader and his ex-wife have died in a car crash and the children now belong to the lawyer.

If you followed all of that, congratulations; either you have a screw loose, or you are great at following nonsensical plots.

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All of this is accompanied by some of the worst music and performances in a film. In a musical, the music should be good, but in this musical, the music is just absolute sheer, unmitigated horror. It was written by Camille, a French singer, and Clément Ducol, a French film composer. It’s absolutely, horrifyingly bad. The lighting is terrible. The choreography is terrible.

At one point, Pérez goes into the bedroom of one of his children and lies down next to his child. They can’t fall asleep. And the kid tells him he smells like his father.

Well, yes; you’ve f***ed up that kid’s life beyond all recognition. First of all, you’re a drug lord. Second of all, you deprived that kid of a father so that you could play dress up.

And we’re supposed to be sympathetic to this person for some reason?

The lyrics are terrible in this scene. The dude smells like “mountains, leather coffee, spicy food, sugar, lamb on the fire, the engine, Diet Coke with lemon, ice, and sweat.” He also smells of “little stones warmed by the sun, mint, Mezcal, guacamole, dogs on car rides, cigarettes.”

Who wrote this? This whole musical was written by a person being hit in the head with a brick.

The end of the film is a parade with a statue looking like the Virgin Mary of this trans-woman, drug-cartel leader who engaged in mass murder, was never prosecuted for it, and betrayed his wife and children. But this person is a saint now, because that’s how the politics work here.

The whole musical turns on one fundamental moral supposition: If you are a person with gender dysphoria and cut off your genitals or have hormone surgery, this means all sins — past, present, and future — are wiped away. All of them. You can do anything to anyone at any time, and you are fully justified in doing so because you have found your identity.

This will be the worst Best Picture winner since “The Shape of Water,” although that’s a brutal decision, the “Sophie’s Choice” of bad movies decisions. Which do you pick? You’re on a desert island, and you only can watch one of these two movies for the rest of time. Which one?

The third option is to drown yourself.

Which may be preferable.