Do Mexicans hate Emilia Pérez?

Critically acclaimed crime comedy is facing backlash

MEXICO:

The crime comedy Emilia Pérez, by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, tells the story of a notorious drug lord who disappears to transition into a woman, and then returns to win back her family.

With its emotional musical numbers, the Netflix production is a Hollywood hit. It has already collected 13 Oscar nominations and won four Golden Globes.

Despite the acclaim, the film has sparked harsh criticism in Mexico.

Even though the plot is set in Mexico, Audiard has produced his drama in a studio near Paris. And with the exception of Adriana Paz, the cast features non-Mexican actors: Spanish trans woman Karla Sofia Gascon in the title role, and US actresses Zoe Saldana and Selena Gomez in other leading roles.

Is 'Emilia Pérez' exploiting Mexico's crisis?

"Emilia Pérez is everything that is bad in a film: stereotypes, ignorance, lack of respect, making money from one of the most serious humanitarian crises in the world (mass disappearances in Mexico)," Cecilia Gonzalez, a Mexican journalist living in Argentina, wrote on X.

Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who works in Hollywood, also criticised that everything in Emilia Pérez seemed "inauthentic" - apart from Adriana Paz.

Paz, who plays the widow of a cartel victim in the film, was present at a press conference in which Audiard's work was sharply criticised. While discussing the situation, she broke into tears and revealed that she had herself been kidnapped about 18 years ago.

For decades, Mexico has been facing gruesome crimes related to the drug war involving opposing cartels, with people disappearing on a daily basis - presumed to be victims of kidnappings and extrajudicial executions.

By August 2024, the National Register of Missing and Disappeared Persons (RNPDNO) had recorded a total of 116,386 missing people, and to date only 40 perpetrators have been convicted in court.

"State authorities are often involved in the crimes," said Francoise Greve, network coordinator on human rights in Mexico for the German branch of the organization International Human Rights. "Very few cases are solved," she told DW.

Literature, films about violence in Mexico

The disappearance of people in Mexico is a bitter reality that has often been portrayed in literature and cinema.

For example, in his novel Olinka (2019), journalist and author Antonio Ortuno depicts a luxury residential complex built by a mafia-run construction company. Ortuno, born in 1976, uses literature to settle accounts with his hometown of Guadalajara. As the seat of a powerful drug cartel, Guadalajara is also deeply impacted by corruption, white-collar crime and drug-related violence.

Chilean writer Roberto Bolano's magnum opus, 2666, was released posthumously, a year after the author's death in 2003. The award-winning novel deals with a series of unsolved murders of women in Mexico.

In 2020, a drama by Fernanda Valadez called Identifying Features premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It tells the story of Mexican mother who is desperately searching for her missing son.

'Most misleading'

Now Emilia Pérez gives a new perspective on the crisis. However, many film critics believe this perspective to be harmful.

Mexican writer Jorge Volpi described it as "one of the crudest and most misleading films of the 21st century" in an op-ed for Spanish newspaper El Pais. To assume that "through a gender transition, the wild and cruel male who has ordered hundreds of murders suddenly transforms into an empathetic woman committed to the weakest is an unforgivable narrative juggling act," the author added, concluding that even if the film wins awards, it only expresses contempt for the victims.

Filmmaker Jacques Audiard has said that he didn't do much research on Mexico and that he knew enough about the country. He explained that even though his story is based on social and political realities, he never aimed to make a documentary about the situation in Mexico or about gender transition.

"I use an exaggerated form, the artificiality of the musical and melodrama, to tell my story emotionally," the film's screenwriter and director told German daily taz.

In fact, Emilia Pérez was originally written as an opera libretto and it has kept the art form's characteristic structure and effect: The emotional scenes launch musical numbers. "Here, the songs are an integral part of the plot, not just decorative accessories," added Audiard.

A narrative that hurts in Mexico

Even with Audiard's story set in Mexico, the disappearances are only ever present in the background. One scene in the film shows the wives of murdered and missing men singing the song Para. Such a choir of widows actually exists in Mexico, pointed out the director.

And gender reassignment is not the focus of the story either: "The real question is: Am I entitled to speak about certain topics? As a white, heterosexual Frenchman in his early 70s, am I allowed to deal with gender transition? With the suffering of the survivors of cartel crimes? Well, I think I am allowed," said the director, who was born in 1952. "I live in this world, I read and perceive, I think about things. And why shouldn't I formulate and express them, whether in a spoken, sung or even danced form?"

"I wanted to go for bigger dimensions, broaden my perspective, reach a wider audience," said Audiard. Of course, this carries the risk of being accused of simplification, he pointed out. "And of course I could have chosen an easier subject. I could spend my life avoiding all sensitive topics."

Human rights coordinator Francoise Greve finds the international attention given to Emilia Pérez particularly problematic: It is "extremely questionable" to portray a cartel boss as a human rights activist, as suggested in the film.

Of course, she added, freedom of artistic expression means that Audiard "can make a film in any way he wants." But one should not thereby just ignore how painful and explosive the topic is in Mexico.

"If you take on a topic like this," she pointed out, "you should also accept responsibility to a certain extent for the narratives that are created and how they resonate." DW