Sex changes, drug lords and gangsters: Emilia Perez film review
Geographically speaking, Emilia Perez is one out of the box. It’s cheesy and loopy and fun to watch – but I’ll be surprised if it wins an acting or directing award at the Oscars.
Geographically speaking, the transgender gangster musical Emilia Perez is one out of the box. It’s set mainly in Mexico but was shot in Parisian film studios and has few Mexican actors in the cast.
It’s written and directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard and is France’s entry for best foreign film at the 2025 Academy Awards. The director was Oscar-nominated in that category for his 2009 French prison drama A Prophet.
It’s also oddball in terms of concept and plot. It’s cheesy and loopy and fun to watch but I think its Oscar buzz is a bit over the top. It will be in the running for score (French composer Clement Ducol) and songs (French singer-songwriter Camille) but I’ll be surprised if it wins an acting or directing award. Of course I may be wrong. The film did win an acting award, for American actor Zoe Saldana, plus three other gongs at the Golden Globes this week: best musical or comedy, best foreign film and best original song.
Here’s the set-up: a murderous Mexican drug cartel boss, Juan Del Monte (Spanish trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon), wants to have a sex change operation. He is married to Jessi (an impressive Selena Gomez) and they have two young sons.
He hires a public defender in Mexico City, Rita Mora Castro (Saldana), who is tired of working for a pittance to secure not guilty verdicts for people such as her latest client: “A prick who kills his wife and we call it suicide.”
She bursts into a song about how it’s time she stopped licking people’s boots and used her talents to make something of herself. It’s the next song, however, that takes us into the melodramatic out there-ness of this movie.
Rita visits a sex change clinic in Bangkok where she is surrounded by nurses and a surgeon who dance and sing about how they specialise in helping men who want to switch “from penis to vagina”.
Perhaps, however, that tune strikes a wrong chord. Rita leaves Bangkok and flies to Tel Aviv where she finds a surgeon who doesn’t sing quite as much (he still does sing though).
In short, the drug lord fakes his own death and goes through with the genital substitution, and a lot more body work. He decides to call his new self Emilia Perez: “My only desire is to be her.”
We fast forward four years. This is where the story becomes interesting. Emilia Perez is no longer a cartel boss but she’s still connected. Will she use that connection for good or bad?
Her former wife is still alive, as are their two sons. So is the lawyer who helped her change gender. She wants to see her children.
When push comes to shove, which mind will take over this changed body: Emilia, who becomes an advocate for families of people gone missing due to the drug trade, or Juan, who made a lot of them missing in the first place?
This does open some challenging questions. Can your new self atone for your old self? What do you do if you hug your two sons, as their “aunt”, and they say you smell like their father? What do you do, as a “cousin”, when you realise your wife had a lover whom she loved?
Do you go with the flow or cut everyone into pieces and feed them to the dogs? Each is possible in this slightly crazy French-made Spanish-language Mexico-set movie which won the Jury Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Emilia Perez (MA15+)
Spanish language with English subtitles
130 minutes
In cinemas
★★★
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