2025 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - Emilia Pérez

Cathy's Review:

    Imagine if, say, an Italian director made a movie about 9/11 without bothering to learn anything about NYC or the people who live there, wrote stereotypical American characters, then translated the script into British English, hiring Cockney actors who couldn't do an American accent to play all the main parts?   And then imagine how New Yorkers would feel if the movie was then praised internationally?

    Change a few details in the above analogy, and you have Emilia Peréz. 

    I actually really liked this controversy-riddled, Spanish-language*, woman-centered movie about redemption, though the genre is difficult to pin down; IMDB lists it as: Comedy, Crime, Drama, Thriller, and ... Musical (yes, it's a musical about a transwoman who leads a Mexican drug cartel).  

    It stars Karla Sofia Gascón as the Mexican drug cartel leader who wants to leave her life of violence behind so she can get the gender-affirming surgery she needs.   Selena Gomez plays the wife, Jessi.  And Zoe Saldaña is the lawyer who helps both of them. 

    The acting is excellent, the scenery is beautiful, and the songs supported the story well.

    The movie is controversial but mostly not because of the currently-politicized transgender issues.  After her own transition, Karla Sofia Gascón made some rather ugly Islamophobic, racist, and misogynistic comments on Twitter.  Weird coming from a member of a marginalized community herself, but there you have it. She apologized and hopefully was sincere.

   

    There are other controversies, though, that are relevant to the production of the movie itself, and they are ... something.  The writer/director of the movie is French, and it was filmed not in Mexico City, but in Paris. I don't fault them for that - it was a French production with a tight budget, and filming in Mexico would have added complexity and expense.  

    But. The writer/director Jacques Audiard really should have done his homework. He speaks neither Spanish nor English, the two main languages spoken in the movie.  He did zero research about Mexico, the missing-persons crisis, the drug cartels, or the people and culture. So, the movie -- however well-made -- is one stereotype after another.

    It gets worse.  He didn't even consider the difference in how Spanish is spoken in Mexico vs. Spain, and the movie only had a single Mexican actor.  At least Selena Gomez was uncomfortable with her non-fluent Spanish, so they made her an American who is somewhat bilingual.   But Zoe Saldaña is American (of Puerto Rican/Dominican descent so she probably does speak the language), yet she plays a Mexican lawyer.  That in itself is not so bad, but they didn't bother to hire a dialog coach for her, and her accent is badly inconsistent (not as bad as Kevin Costner's in Prince of Thieves, but close). Karla Sofia Gascón is Spanish, not Mexican, but she's done a lot of acting in Mexican soap operas, so I suspect her accent was better.

    Even with the problems, the movie is mesmerizing, and captures emotion and pain, and inspired family discussions about what it means to change and whether it's possible for violent individuals to genuinely redeem themselves.

    * The movie is about 2/3 - 3/4 in Spanish, with the remainder in English.

Chris's review: 

    Emilia Pérez is a movie about how much a person can change themselves. More importantly, it's about the limits to those changes even in the face of a lot of dedicated wealth and will.

    While trying to evaluate things, I think most important is that the film was captivating. Our family broke the viewing up over three short sessions. Even with a lot of the dialogue in languages I don't speak (primarily Spanish) and the extra attention that requires, each time we were wrapping up a session (to suit the needs of my loved ones), I found that I didn't really want to stop. 

    The film is also a musical, and I think about a third of the song-n-dance routines were mildly annoying, a third were sort of fine, and a third were really great. The great ones stick with me a lot more than the opposite third, so I think I consider that element of the movie a success -- more for the dance choreography than for the music.

    There are apparently a bunch of ham-fisted decisions made in writing/casting/directing the movie -- things I found out about after viewing it and that I wasn't educated enough to pick up on on my own. They sound pretty bad, and maybe it could have been even better, but I don't think they were particularly detrimental to my enjoyment. I'm specifically not down-ranking anything here because of those aspects.

(Pithy Reviews; and Rankings* out of 10 nominees):

• Conclave (Absorbing conspiracy at the Vatican; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
• Emilia Pérez (Stereotypes, redemption, and transition; Cathy: 2, Chris: 2)
• The Substance  (Excellent horror movie ruined by ending; Cathy: 3, Chris: 3)
• Wicked (Beautiful, yet boring; Cathy: 4, Chris: 4)
• Anora (Steaming pile of говно; Cathy: 5, Chris: 5)

* Rankings can change.

Unranked/yet-to-be-seen:

• Unwatched - The Brutalist (Jewish architect rebuilds his life in America after the Holocaust)
• Unwatched - A Complete Unknown (A biopic about the early days of Bob Dylan's career)
• Rewatching - Dune: Part Two (House Atreides kicks House Harkonnen off Arrakis)
• Unwatched - I'm Still Here/Ainda Estou Aqui (A Brazilian politician's wife makes a new life after her husband is disappeared in 1971)
• Unwatched - Nickel Boys (1960s-era reform school survival story)