emilia perez (w&d audiard, w. thomas bidegain, léa mysius, nicolas livecchi)

Audiard’s film has become a bizarre phenomenon. Feted by awards, condemned by word of mouth. At once a blow for non-gringo, anti-imperialist impulses, and a betrayal of Mexico, trans people and the countless victims of Mexico’s dirty war. A radical reinterpretation of how to tell a political story which is mundane and over-simplistic.

There are many elements of the film which are either laughable or questionable. Audiard laces his story with songs, some of which feel cloying and witlessly sentimental. The whole premise of a reformed narco financing a charity to locate the dead victims of the narco wars feels wrong, before we even get to the issue of the arbitrary sex change. The closing shoot-out is generic and unimaginative. Audiard apparently didn’t do much if any filming in Mexico itself and there is an undeniable whiff of the interloper rolling into town and appropriating other people’s tragedies for his own benefit.

And yet, having said all of this, in comparison to a film like Villeneuve’s Sicario, it does feel as though the director is seeking to do more than just cash in on a suitably cinematographic conflict as a backdrop for his film. It’s a far cry from Escalante’s Heli, but Audiard at times feels as though he is seeking a more poetic or lyrical discourse on the issues of power and violence. Regular narrative structures struggle to do any kind of justice to this topic and run the risk, as was the case of Sicario, of resorting to caricature. Audiard seems to have succeeded in offending, whilst intending to avoid these caricatures. Something he formerly succeeded in doing in The Beat that my Heart Skipped, for example.

Working in the business, one often comes across people suggesting ideas that at first glance seem preposterous, but, within the strange economy of cinema aesthetics, seem to work (Carax, Lynch, to name just two.) Going out on a limb sometimes pays off. One can imagine Audiard positing ‘Sex Change Narco,  the musical’, and the execs looking at him blankly. Thinking either he’s a genius or an idiot. When maybe the truth is a bit of both. It’s a position that has both paid off spectacularly and backfired, spectacularly.