What 'Emilia Pérez' gets wrong about Mexico: 'It's a cartoon'

USA Today

03-03-2025

Spoiler alert: We're discussing plot details from Oscar best-picture contender "Emilia Pérez"(streaming now on Netflix).
The ending of Netflix's "Emilia Pérez" was both poignant and where the film felt its most hypocritical. Perhaps that's the essence of the controversial film that's nominated for 13 Oscars.
After the film climaxes in a predictable shootout, the title character − a Mexican cartel leader who undergoes gender-affirming surgery and is reborn as an activist − is sanctified and immortalized. Her image is resurrected in the form of a life-size Virgen de Guadalupe as mourners lead a procession. Emilia − played by Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón, the first openly transgender best actress nominee − is atoned and forgiven for the deaths she's responsible for as a drug kingpin.
A powerful and moving scene, for sure, but it leaves a sour taste. Are we just ignoring that she was a cartel leader for much longer than she was a woman of the people, helping Mexican citizens find the remains of loved ones killed by organized crime?
The film, directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard and starring Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Mexican actress Adriana Paz, was seemingly a strong Oscar contender. Then Gascón's racist and xenophobic social media posts resurfaced in the thick of awards season, shifting how it was received by audiences and voters alike.
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The problem with "Emilia Pérez," however, didn't start with Gascón's tweets. It began with the movie's representation of Mexico and how it depicted one of the country's most vulnerable groups of people.
For decades, Mexico has dealt with a drug problem that's caused the mass disappearance of people at the hands of criminal organizations in the country.
Since 2006, Human Rights Watch reports, Mexico has seen an estimated 90,000 disappearances, and more than 460,000 homicides including politicians, students and journalists, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Between 2007 and 2023, the Mexican government counted nearly 6,000 clandestine graves, per the International Center for Transitional Justice.
It's "such a sensitive topic, one that you really have to tread lightly with," says Jason De León, an anthropologist and author of "Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling."
Instead, Audiard's approach feels rather careless and exploitative.
After Emilia's transition and return to Mexico, she's stopped in a food market by a grieving mother searching for her lost son killed by cartels. Touched by the gesture, and guilt gnawing at her, Emilia proposes to Rita (Saldaña) that they open a nonprofit dedicated to finding the disappeared.
We're expected to brush off the fact that it's now that she chooses to clean up the messes she's had a hand in, simply because she's moved past her former life.
"People who lose a loved one because they've disappeared is probably the worst form of trauma that anybody can experience," says De León, who previously ran a nonprofit working with families of missing migrants. "It can never be resolved because you never quite know what happened."
At its best, "Emilia Pérez" tackles love and identity with Saldaña and Gascón pouring it all into their roles − but even if Audiard never intended the film to be about Mexican drug cartels, it's what he calls back to constantly.
"The cartels are these symbolic metaphorical ideas in the American imagination," says Héctor Tobar, author of "Our Migrant Souls" and professor at the University of California in Irvine. "That subject material is always going to be extremely problematic and like every other film about cartels, it can't help but glorify them."
In a recent interview, Audiard dismissed objections to the depiction of cartels and their victims. "The representation of the cartels in the film is thematic," he told Deadline. "It's not something that I'm particularly focused on in the film. There's one scene that deals with it."
Rita is essentially abducted by Manitas' cartel multiple times throughout the film, and she's tasked with visiting imprisoned drug lords to uncover leads about mass graves. There's an entire musical number, "Para," where Rita, Emilia and volunteers help find missing people. When kidnapped in the final scenes of the movie, Emilia instructs Rita to call on her former cartel workers to bail her out.
And then it all ends in a shootout.
"As someone who cares about my community and cares about my country, and cares about my art, it's sad," says Tobar. "You have all these incredibly talented people working on a story that, in the end, turns out to be another narco telenovela."
Cartels may be thematic in Audiard's version of Mexico but for many families, they're a point of trauma − an open wound reduced to a melodramatic musical using a drug baron's redemption arc as the catalyst. Or as Mexican screenwriter Héctor Guillén wrote on X in a post viewed more than 2.7 million times: "Almost 500K dead and France decides to do a musical."
As a result, we get a film that doesn't take the issue of mass disappearances seriously and a film that doesn't represent Mexico or its people accurately, let alone intentionally.
"It's like you have to ask permission if you're a Latino to tell a story that doesn't involve gangs, drugs, cartels or migration," De León adds. "It's indicative of an incredible lack of imagination in Hollywood when it comes to the Latino experience."
"Emilia Pérez," France's Oscar submission, marks the first time since 2018's "Roma" (directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón) that a film about the Mexican community is nominated for best picture.
And yet, the 13 Oscar nominations it's up for don't feel like a reason to celebrate for many Mexicans and Mexican Americans. (Or for LGBTQ communities. GLAAD called it a "retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.")
"Emilia Pérez" doesn't tell the empowering story it thinks it's portraying about a trans character and self-acceptance, and it sure doesn't use Mexico's mass disappearances responsibly as a vehicle to tell that story.
It uses a country and victims of drug crimes as an aesthetic rather than to bring awareness to the issue or tell a different and actually thought-provoking story.
"Hollywood only likes Latinos telling certain types of stories and playing certain kinds of roles," De León says. It "could have been so much more, but instead, it's cartoon."