KULTURKAMPF
It’s up for the most Oscars this year, but the film, its star, and its director are all propping up dangerous tropes.
Ali M. Latifi
Asia Editor
NEW HUANITARIAN
Faye's Vision/Cover Images via Reuters ConnectEmilia Pérez has been a critical hit since its Cannes premiere, but Latino and queer audiences, in particular, have found the musical about a trans Mexican druglord to be full of tropes and racism.
Editor’s note: This opinion piece is part of an occasional series exploring cultural topics adjacent to our humanitarian coverage.
Editor’s note: This opinion piece is part of an occasional series exploring cultural topics adjacent to our humanitarian coverage.
BANGKOK
Emilia Pérez has been earning critical acclaim since its Cannes premiere last May. The musical – about a Mexican drug lord who transitions into a woman in an attempt to leave her violent past behind – has been racking up nominations at major awards shows. At the Oscars this weekend, it’s up for 13 prizes, the most of any film.
The industry has wholeheartedly embraced the film. “It’s bold, it’s daring, it’s a vision,” said James Cameron. British actress Emily Blunt called it “a singular experience”. Honduran-American actress America Ferrera, who has long talked about challenging Anglo-Saxon beauty standards and advancing Latino representation, simply said, “Don’t miss it”, in an Instagram post. Director Greta Gerwig, who served on the jury at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, gave its four leads the Best Actress prize.
But for all its industry support, audiences – and Latino and queer audiences, in particular – have largely been confused by the film’s acclaim.
To its many detractors, Emilia Pérez’s attempts at representation are hollow – full of too many missteps to be taken seriously. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for example, called it out as “a step backward for trans representation”.
Though the story takes place in Mexico and was shot in France, it was eventually co-opted as some sort of treatise on politics in the United States, which was in the midst of a presidential election during the film’s promotional cycle.
Had Kamala Harris won the election, it would likely have been held up as an example of the kind of multicultural, gender-affirming, and feminist society her backers purported a Harris victory would herald.
Of course, the former prosecutor did not become the first female president. Nor did she become the first Indian-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.
Instead, Donald Trump, the embodiment of a straight, white man, made history himself as only the second president to secure two non-consecutive terms. Immediately after returning to the Oval Office, Trump made it official government policy to recognise only two genders, embarked on a mass deportation effort, and claimed he would “wage war” against the cartels in Central and South America.
To some critics, high-profile directors, and actors who showered the film with effusive praise for its supposed representation and for simultaneously tackling the issues of cartel violence and gender identity, Trump’s declaration that Mexico was “essentially run by cartels” made the film even more politically potent.
“Emilia Pérez’s Golden Globes triumph is a giant middle finger to Trump,” a Telegraph headline read after the film won four prizes at the January ceremony.
But this did not ring true for people from the communities the film claimed to represent. For them, Emilia Pérez highlighted the flimsiness of the kinds of identity politics the Democratic Party hoped would lead them to a history-making victory.
In fact, it may be more in line with Trump’s bombastic rhetoric that managed to combine and conflate the racism behind the United States’ failed wars on drugs and terror, both of which were aimed almost directly at brown and Black men.
As online film critic Grace Randolph said, the film made the industry “look tone deaf” because it was “forcing representation on people who were saying ‘this is horrible representation, we don’t want it.’”
Considering a University of Southern California study found that between 2006 and 2022 only 4.4% of leads and co-leads were Latino, that’s saying a lot about how they view Emilia Pérez’s portrayal of Latinos.
“I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Spanish”
For its strongest critics, Emilia Pérez is nothing more than a straight white Frenchman’s offensive and reductive vision of Mexico, transnational drug violence (which has claimed at least 500,000 lives since 2006), and transgenderism.
The numerous controversies that have plagued the film since the announcement of its 13 Oscar nominations – the second-highest in history – have done little to disavow its critics of that view.
When director Jacques Audiard set out to make the movie, he said he didn’t feel it necessary to learn Spanish or shoot the film in Mexico. In fact, he said Mexico was too limiting a place for what he had envisioned. He went on to write the script, which has earned him a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite not speaking the two languages of the protagonists, before shooting the film in a studio in his native France.
“When it comes to languages, I’m a loser. I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Spanish, so on. But every morning when I went to work, I had to figure out how to speak Karla Sofía [Gascón], how to speak Selena [Gomez], how to speak Zoë [Saldaña], these vernacular languages,” Audiard said, after an October screening of the film at the Directors Guild of America.
Audiard’s disregard for linguistic and geographic accuracy is in itself an act of colonialist hubris.
So Audiard ended up directing a film about some of the most important and contested political and societal issues of the day with a cast speaking (both on and off the set) entirely in languages he didn’t understand.
Zoë Saldaña, the Puerto-Rican actress who plays one of the four leads, tried to defend this during an online roundtable, saying Audiard’s vision isn’t “limited by language”.
The way the now Best Supporting Actress nominee saw it, the camaraderie on the set overcame any language barriers between the director and his stars, “When you’re synced with people, a language is just one more tool.”
“It was a beautiful process,” she said.
Despite Saldaña’s positivity, the truth is that Audiard’s disregard for linguistic and geographic accuracy is in itself an act of colonialist hubris. The history of Hollywood is littered with examples of an outsider presuming to push his own vision of a community and a country he doesn’t belong to under the guise of art. From The Good Earth to Lawrence of Arabia to Out of Africa, many have been rewarded with gold statuettes.
It’s not to say there haven’t been successful examples of directors working outside their native language. Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee admitted it was his limited “pidgin English” that kept him from being an actor and eventually turned him to directing. When he was making 2005’s Brokeback Mountain – which earned him Best Picture and Best Director nominations – Lee admitted: “There’s nothing further away from me than Wyoming gay cowboys”. However, he managed to traverse that disconnect and, unlike Audiard, won praise for crafting a film that offered an authentic and understated look at struggling with one’s sexuality in the 1960s.
For the world’s 500 million native Spanish speakers, who are among the film’s sharpest critics, the inaccuracies that Audiard’s lack of proficiency led to are glaringly obvious.
“Given that I don’t speak Spanish, the nuances of the Mexican accent versus the Castilian were lost on me,” Audiard admitted to The New York Times. “We had all these problems with accents, but we fixed them in the edit. We did a lot of dubbing.”
When Audiard spoke to French media about his views on the Spanish language, he did not mince his words.
“Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants,” he said. Audiard’s inability to see that due to colonialism the same could easily be said about French and English highlights how little he understood about the communities he sought to portray, and how colonial his mindset truly is.
For a man whose portrayal of Mexico was called “hypnotic and beautiful” by famed Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, his assumptions about the economic status of entire swathes of people in Central and South America, Europe, and the African continent, don’t sound too far off from Trump, who has made it his goal to deport millions of people from such backgrounds.
It also falls in with how Hollywood has typically portrayed Latinos. According to that USC study, 24.4% of Latino leads played immigrants. The same amount were portrayed as low-income characters. Criminals made up 57.8% of the roles, and of those, 46.2% were violent criminals.
The characters in Emilia Pérez represent all of those at one time or another.
Ironically, America Ferrera, who seemed to love the film, had spoken out against such representations back in 2023.
“According to the numbers, the dominant narrative our industry puts into the world is that Latinos either don’t exist or they are poor, immigrant criminals,” she said at an Academy luncheon.
When speaking of the drug war that spans the American landmass, Audiard was just as trite and reductive. “What interested me also is the endemic violence that Mexico deals with and the tremendous amount of people who have disappeared,” he said to The New York Times about 100,000 missing people, a matter that becomes a major plot point towards the end of the film.
The overly simplistic redemption arc for Gascón’s Emilia and Saldaña’s Rita has also come under severe criticism. “It outrages us by not considering the daily pain that consumes us every day. Here, in reality, there are no happy endings – only tragedy, abandonment, and desolation,” a group of mothers of the disappeared said of the film’s portrayal of the search for the missing.
To the film’s sharpest critics, for whom the attempts at representation were laughable, there was only way to get back at Audiard, with their own humor. That’s exactly what Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora decided to do when she made Johanne Sacrebleu, a satirical send-up of Emilia Pérez that is laden with French stereotypes, including a star-crossed trans love story between the heirs to baguette and croissant fortunes respectively. The 20-minute short was a hit with Latin American audiences.
Camila D. Aurora/YouTubeDirector and writer Camila Aurora González in a scene from Johanne Sacrebleu, a 20-minute short satirical film in response to Emilia Pérez.
“An Afro-Korean festival”
After the film’s Cannes premiere – where it secured the Jury Prize – Karla Sofía Gascón started gaining Oscar buzz for her turn as the titular character. When Gascón did secure her Oscar nomination last month, she too made history as the first openly trans Best Actress nominee.
At the Golden Globes, where the film won in the Best Picture (Musical/Comedy) category, Gascón made it a point to invoke her identity, saying, “The light always wins over darkness… I am who I am, not who you want.”
The ceremony took place in Los Angeles two weeks before Trump assumed office.
However, as the campaign season rolled on, her own darkness came to light after her years-long history of bigoted tweets were exposed. Though they went as far back as 2016, many of her most egregious statements were posted between 2020 and 2021.
Each post showed that despite her words at the Golden Globes, Gascón herself prefers entire communities of people to be as she wishes.
In September 2020, she posted a photo of Muslim woman in a niqab saying, “Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves. Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY.”
That was just one of several posts that highlighted that Gascón believes there are too many Muslims in her native Spain and that the religion should be banned. To help make her point, she turned to old colonial tropes, referring to Moroccans as “fucking Moors”.
Her prejudices were not limited to Spain and Islamophobia. She also felt it necessary to comment on the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality in the United States.
Only days after the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd, she said in a now-deleted tweet, “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins… They’re all wrong.”
Even the Academy Awards were not free from her disdain. Reacting to the 2021 ceremony, in which Chloe Zhao, Daniel Kaluuya and Yuh-Jung Youn won Best Director and Best Supporting Actor and Actress respectively, Gascón said: “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films. I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M.”
The one person she did seem to have some sympathy for: Adolf Hitler. “I do not understand so much world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion of the Jews. Well, that’s how the world goes,” she said of the Third Reich leader in 2019.
Gascón, it seems, wants to be accepted for who and what she is but has little sympathy for others.
Even in her apology, sent to El País, Gascón doubled down on her hubris and ignorance.
“I will never agree with women being forced to wear a burqa,” she said in reference to her picture from a restaurant in Spain. For someone who asked for “forgiveness” and says she should not be held responsible for “what others interpret” her statements to mean, Gascón seems to have few qualms about airing her own Islamophobic assumptions about a religion of more than a billion people.
The fact is, there was no proof the woman in Gascón’s photo was forced to cover. Furthermore, the garment she was wearing was a niqab, not a burqa. Though it has become a catch-all for any covering worn by conservative Muslim women, “burqa” is the Westernised term for a specific all-encompassing garment some Afghan women wear.
Gascón proceeded to invoke the term “lynching” to describe the online backlash her posts have received. It is both surprising and confirming that a woman who is under fire for years of racist rhetoric would employ the term lynching in her defense.
For Black people in the US, the term has historically been used to show the white supremacist policies and vigilante violence that led to the deaths of thousands of mostly Black men at the hands of angry white mobs.
Taken together, Audiard’s and Gascón’s comments show that the era of good intentions in Hollywood must come to an end. Simply claiming you have something positive to say is no longer enough. Identity politics can no longer be used to shield you from criticism. Representation matters, but that alone is also not enough.
Rather than checking boxes, the focus should be on understanding, accuracy, and yes, decolonisation.
As the director and star (not to mention the content of the film itself) show, whiteness and imperialism are still powerful, potent forces, and their stranglehold is not limited by a political ideal, gender, or medium.
Emilia Pérez has been earning critical acclaim since its Cannes premiere last May. The musical – about a Mexican drug lord who transitions into a woman in an attempt to leave her violent past behind – has been racking up nominations at major awards shows. At the Oscars this weekend, it’s up for 13 prizes, the most of any film.
The industry has wholeheartedly embraced the film. “It’s bold, it’s daring, it’s a vision,” said James Cameron. British actress Emily Blunt called it “a singular experience”. Honduran-American actress America Ferrera, who has long talked about challenging Anglo-Saxon beauty standards and advancing Latino representation, simply said, “Don’t miss it”, in an Instagram post. Director Greta Gerwig, who served on the jury at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, gave its four leads the Best Actress prize.
But for all its industry support, audiences – and Latino and queer audiences, in particular – have largely been confused by the film’s acclaim.
To its many detractors, Emilia Pérez’s attempts at representation are hollow – full of too many missteps to be taken seriously. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for example, called it out as “a step backward for trans representation”.
Though the story takes place in Mexico and was shot in France, it was eventually co-opted as some sort of treatise on politics in the United States, which was in the midst of a presidential election during the film’s promotional cycle.
Had Kamala Harris won the election, it would likely have been held up as an example of the kind of multicultural, gender-affirming, and feminist society her backers purported a Harris victory would herald.
Of course, the former prosecutor did not become the first female president. Nor did she become the first Indian-American to ascend to the highest office in the land.
Instead, Donald Trump, the embodiment of a straight, white man, made history himself as only the second president to secure two non-consecutive terms. Immediately after returning to the Oval Office, Trump made it official government policy to recognise only two genders, embarked on a mass deportation effort, and claimed he would “wage war” against the cartels in Central and South America.
To some critics, high-profile directors, and actors who showered the film with effusive praise for its supposed representation and for simultaneously tackling the issues of cartel violence and gender identity, Trump’s declaration that Mexico was “essentially run by cartels” made the film even more politically potent.
“Emilia Pérez’s Golden Globes triumph is a giant middle finger to Trump,” a Telegraph headline read after the film won four prizes at the January ceremony.
But this did not ring true for people from the communities the film claimed to represent. For them, Emilia Pérez highlighted the flimsiness of the kinds of identity politics the Democratic Party hoped would lead them to a history-making victory.
In fact, it may be more in line with Trump’s bombastic rhetoric that managed to combine and conflate the racism behind the United States’ failed wars on drugs and terror, both of which were aimed almost directly at brown and Black men.
As online film critic Grace Randolph said, the film made the industry “look tone deaf” because it was “forcing representation on people who were saying ‘this is horrible representation, we don’t want it.’”
Considering a University of Southern California study found that between 2006 and 2022 only 4.4% of leads and co-leads were Latino, that’s saying a lot about how they view Emilia Pérez’s portrayal of Latinos.
“I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Spanish”
For its strongest critics, Emilia Pérez is nothing more than a straight white Frenchman’s offensive and reductive vision of Mexico, transnational drug violence (which has claimed at least 500,000 lives since 2006), and transgenderism.
The numerous controversies that have plagued the film since the announcement of its 13 Oscar nominations – the second-highest in history – have done little to disavow its critics of that view.
When director Jacques Audiard set out to make the movie, he said he didn’t feel it necessary to learn Spanish or shoot the film in Mexico. In fact, he said Mexico was too limiting a place for what he had envisioned. He went on to write the script, which has earned him a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite not speaking the two languages of the protagonists, before shooting the film in a studio in his native France.
“When it comes to languages, I’m a loser. I don’t speak English, I don’t speak Spanish, so on. But every morning when I went to work, I had to figure out how to speak Karla Sofía [Gascón], how to speak Selena [Gomez], how to speak Zoë [Saldaña], these vernacular languages,” Audiard said, after an October screening of the film at the Directors Guild of America.
Audiard’s disregard for linguistic and geographic accuracy is in itself an act of colonialist hubris.
So Audiard ended up directing a film about some of the most important and contested political and societal issues of the day with a cast speaking (both on and off the set) entirely in languages he didn’t understand.
Zoë Saldaña, the Puerto-Rican actress who plays one of the four leads, tried to defend this during an online roundtable, saying Audiard’s vision isn’t “limited by language”.
The way the now Best Supporting Actress nominee saw it, the camaraderie on the set overcame any language barriers between the director and his stars, “When you’re synced with people, a language is just one more tool.”
“It was a beautiful process,” she said.
Despite Saldaña’s positivity, the truth is that Audiard’s disregard for linguistic and geographic accuracy is in itself an act of colonialist hubris. The history of Hollywood is littered with examples of an outsider presuming to push his own vision of a community and a country he doesn’t belong to under the guise of art. From The Good Earth to Lawrence of Arabia to Out of Africa, many have been rewarded with gold statuettes.
It’s not to say there haven’t been successful examples of directors working outside their native language. Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee admitted it was his limited “pidgin English” that kept him from being an actor and eventually turned him to directing. When he was making 2005’s Brokeback Mountain – which earned him Best Picture and Best Director nominations – Lee admitted: “There’s nothing further away from me than Wyoming gay cowboys”. However, he managed to traverse that disconnect and, unlike Audiard, won praise for crafting a film that offered an authentic and understated look at struggling with one’s sexuality in the 1960s.
For the world’s 500 million native Spanish speakers, who are among the film’s sharpest critics, the inaccuracies that Audiard’s lack of proficiency led to are glaringly obvious.
“Given that I don’t speak Spanish, the nuances of the Mexican accent versus the Castilian were lost on me,” Audiard admitted to The New York Times. “We had all these problems with accents, but we fixed them in the edit. We did a lot of dubbing.”
When Audiard spoke to French media about his views on the Spanish language, he did not mince his words.
“Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants,” he said. Audiard’s inability to see that due to colonialism the same could easily be said about French and English highlights how little he understood about the communities he sought to portray, and how colonial his mindset truly is.
For a man whose portrayal of Mexico was called “hypnotic and beautiful” by famed Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro, his assumptions about the economic status of entire swathes of people in Central and South America, Europe, and the African continent, don’t sound too far off from Trump, who has made it his goal to deport millions of people from such backgrounds.
It also falls in with how Hollywood has typically portrayed Latinos. According to that USC study, 24.4% of Latino leads played immigrants. The same amount were portrayed as low-income characters. Criminals made up 57.8% of the roles, and of those, 46.2% were violent criminals.
The characters in Emilia Pérez represent all of those at one time or another.
Ironically, America Ferrera, who seemed to love the film, had spoken out against such representations back in 2023.
“According to the numbers, the dominant narrative our industry puts into the world is that Latinos either don’t exist or they are poor, immigrant criminals,” she said at an Academy luncheon.
When speaking of the drug war that spans the American landmass, Audiard was just as trite and reductive. “What interested me also is the endemic violence that Mexico deals with and the tremendous amount of people who have disappeared,” he said to The New York Times about 100,000 missing people, a matter that becomes a major plot point towards the end of the film.
The overly simplistic redemption arc for Gascón’s Emilia and Saldaña’s Rita has also come under severe criticism. “It outrages us by not considering the daily pain that consumes us every day. Here, in reality, there are no happy endings – only tragedy, abandonment, and desolation,” a group of mothers of the disappeared said of the film’s portrayal of the search for the missing.
To the film’s sharpest critics, for whom the attempts at representation were laughable, there was only way to get back at Audiard, with their own humor. That’s exactly what Mexican filmmaker Camila Aurora decided to do when she made Johanne Sacrebleu, a satirical send-up of Emilia Pérez that is laden with French stereotypes, including a star-crossed trans love story between the heirs to baguette and croissant fortunes respectively. The 20-minute short was a hit with Latin American audiences.
Camila D. Aurora/YouTubeDirector and writer Camila Aurora González in a scene from Johanne Sacrebleu, a 20-minute short satirical film in response to Emilia Pérez.
“An Afro-Korean festival”
After the film’s Cannes premiere – where it secured the Jury Prize – Karla Sofía Gascón started gaining Oscar buzz for her turn as the titular character. When Gascón did secure her Oscar nomination last month, she too made history as the first openly trans Best Actress nominee.
At the Golden Globes, where the film won in the Best Picture (Musical/Comedy) category, Gascón made it a point to invoke her identity, saying, “The light always wins over darkness… I am who I am, not who you want.”
The ceremony took place in Los Angeles two weeks before Trump assumed office.
However, as the campaign season rolled on, her own darkness came to light after her years-long history of bigoted tweets were exposed. Though they went as far back as 2016, many of her most egregious statements were posted between 2020 and 2021.
Each post showed that despite her words at the Golden Globes, Gascón herself prefers entire communities of people to be as she wishes.
In September 2020, she posted a photo of Muslim woman in a niqab saying, “Islam is marvelous, without any machismo. Women are respected, and when they are so respected they are left with a little squared hole on their faces for their eyes to be visible and their mouths, but only if she behaves. Although they dress this way for their own enjoyment. How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY.”
That was just one of several posts that highlighted that Gascón believes there are too many Muslims in her native Spain and that the religion should be banned. To help make her point, she turned to old colonial tropes, referring to Moroccans as “fucking Moors”.
Her prejudices were not limited to Spain and Islamophobia. She also felt it necessary to comment on the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality in the United States.
Only days after the May 2020 police murder of George Floyd, she said in a now-deleted tweet, “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins… They’re all wrong.”
Even the Academy Awards were not free from her disdain. Reacting to the 2021 ceremony, in which Chloe Zhao, Daniel Kaluuya and Yuh-Jung Youn won Best Director and Best Supporting Actor and Actress respectively, Gascón said: “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films. I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M.”
The one person she did seem to have some sympathy for: Adolf Hitler. “I do not understand so much world war against Hitler, he simply had his opinion of the Jews. Well, that’s how the world goes,” she said of the Third Reich leader in 2019.
Gascón, it seems, wants to be accepted for who and what she is but has little sympathy for others.
Even in her apology, sent to El País, Gascón doubled down on her hubris and ignorance.
“I will never agree with women being forced to wear a burqa,” she said in reference to her picture from a restaurant in Spain. For someone who asked for “forgiveness” and says she should not be held responsible for “what others interpret” her statements to mean, Gascón seems to have few qualms about airing her own Islamophobic assumptions about a religion of more than a billion people.
The fact is, there was no proof the woman in Gascón’s photo was forced to cover. Furthermore, the garment she was wearing was a niqab, not a burqa. Though it has become a catch-all for any covering worn by conservative Muslim women, “burqa” is the Westernised term for a specific all-encompassing garment some Afghan women wear.
Gascón proceeded to invoke the term “lynching” to describe the online backlash her posts have received. It is both surprising and confirming that a woman who is under fire for years of racist rhetoric would employ the term lynching in her defense.
For Black people in the US, the term has historically been used to show the white supremacist policies and vigilante violence that led to the deaths of thousands of mostly Black men at the hands of angry white mobs.
Taken together, Audiard’s and Gascón’s comments show that the era of good intentions in Hollywood must come to an end. Simply claiming you have something positive to say is no longer enough. Identity politics can no longer be used to shield you from criticism. Representation matters, but that alone is also not enough.
Rather than checking boxes, the focus should be on understanding, accuracy, and yes, decolonisation.
As the director and star (not to mention the content of the film itself) show, whiteness and imperialism are still powerful, potent forces, and their stranglehold is not limited by a political ideal, gender, or medium.
