Movie Review: Acclaimed 'Emilia Pérez' Feels More Like 'Mrs. Doubtfire' Meets Telenovelas

As this year’s film festival circuit winds down and awards season commences, we seem to already be receiving 2024’s equivalent of Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004) and Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (2018). It’s a movie that intends to be morally progressive but is too flawed and ignorant to actually make a difference.

When Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez made a splash at Cannes, Telluride and Toronto this past year, many critics and pundits predicted Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and even Selena Gomez might get Oscar nominations. But as the picture hits select theaters and streaming this month, movie fans have been roasting the film.

This is a great cast directed by the same filmmaker of acclaimed dramas like A Prophet (2009), Rust and Bone (2012) and Dheepan (2015). What went wrong?

In present day Mexico City, Rita Mora (Saldaña) is a struggling lawyer who has to take whichever clients she can get, even if it means going against her own beliefs. After she begrudgingly helps a murderer get off the hook, she receives a secret offer from a local cartel leader, Juan De Monte (Gascón), to help find him a surgeon so he can fulfill his desire to transition into a woman and leave behind his kingpin reputation.

After succeeding at his offer, Rita takes her large payment to expand her law career and Juan begins going by ‘Emilia Pérez.’ When the two bump into each other four years later while Rita is living in London, she discovers Emilia wants to reconnect with her kids from her estranged wife, Jessi (Gomez).

Édgar Ramírez appears as Jessi’s lover after Juan/Emilia leaves the family to start a new life. Emilia Pérez is loosely based off Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute as well as an expansion of Audiard’s own 2021 opera also titled Emilia Pérez. While the new foreign film has all the potentialwith the talented actors and flashy visuals, the story and character arcs are just too convoluted to naturally come together.

A big problem is that — besides the dialogue being primarily Spanish, the cast being mostly Hispanic, and Gascón being trans — no one behind the scenes is actually Latino or a part of the LGBTQ community. This is a CIS and French-directed, written and produced feature and it shows.

Obviously artists are allowed to set their work outside of their own home or orientation, but the problem here is that it’s just really obvious the creators don’t have any actual experience or association with either representation here. On top of all this, Emilia Pérez is — like Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux — a musical made by people who clearly aren’t trained in that area.

Watching the musical numbers actually makes us wish Emilia Pérez was either a straight melodrama or a full-on opera like Audiard initially intended. The songs are strangely short and end abruptly, which makes the sequences feel amateurish.

Although Gascón and Gomez are fine, the real acting standout holding the whole film together is Saldaña. After spending over a decade in extensive costumes and make-up for Marvel, Avatar and Star Trek, it’s great to see her dramatic range again, as well as her gifted dancing, since she was originally a ballerina before switching to cinema. It’s also a nice rarity to hear her speak fluent Spanish.

It’s too bad the material doesn’t always match the level of the performances. Ultimately, Emilia Pérez is an imperfect effort that means well, but ends up feeling like Chris Columbus’ Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) meets telenovelas.