The “Hollywood Stereotype,” like films usually adhering to stereotypes and cinema “laws,” such as the final girl in horror flicks or blondes being “stupid,” has died down a lot in recent years. In the past, choppy and stereotypical movies have been put out into the world, with praise from Hollywood critics — but disapproval from actual minorities with the stereotypes in these films. This has changed in recent years, with captivating and stellar films that have struck their audience with a unique, in depth perspective unlike their own; allowing them to learn lessons from the film and understand the mind of a character the director has meticulously created.
Emilia Pérez, however, is definitely not one of those movies, and instead has leaned back into these harmful stereotypes that Hollywood seem to adore.
Emilia Pérez, a 2024 Mexican crime musical premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, seemed to be an interesting and quite frankly, new point of view at transgender reputation for me. Before the movie had released, I’d had high hopes for it, seeing how the movie was to be centered around a Mexican drug cartel lord that’d undergo gender-affirming surgery to begin a new life. Seeing this sort of representation for not only the LGBTQ+ community but also seeing it from a Mexican perspective sounded like a great learning experience for me, and to understand the struggles that Pérez would go through with these transitions, but I was ever so wrong.
As I was watching the musical, I felt disgusted, bored and awkward as I listened to many of the “musical” pieces and tried to follow along with the story. At the end of the film, I realized that this wasn’t a truthful adaptation about the struggles of going through gender-affirming surgery as such a harmful individual, but a trans and Mexican stereotypical film that I was completely shocked to learn was on the block for 13 Oscars, one being Best Picture, which I thought barely made sense.
The transitions and cuts in the musical felt choppy, and although I loved the lighting and colors (though that’s another problem), I couldn’t possibly understand how this would be nominated for best picture going up against films such as The Substance or Wicked.
Digging further into the film, I’ve found that the director for the film, Jacques Audiard, was not Mexican, but a French filmmaker. This I didn’t really mind in and of itself, as Audiard stated how intrigued he was with the concept of transitioning. I could completely understand his perspective here, however the actions he took to try and make this movie a success, were his beliefs and thoughts on not only transitioning, but Mexican culture in general.
From an article from The Latinx Project titled “‘Emilia Perez’ Is All Outline, No Substance,” written by Adriana Santos, it’s shown that in a screening for Emilia Pérez, Audiard explains just how little background information he’d look for whilst producing the movie. “I didn’t study much. I kinda already knew what I had to understand.”
Which, remembering his background as a French director, made no sense and was shown clear to me that this project would have some Hollywood stereotype smeared throughout the script because of his little experience with Mexican culture. In another interview for Interview Magazine, Audiard also states, “if I don’t speak the language, I have the freedom to just focus on the musicality of the language itself . . . I loved listening to the flow of the music, of the language, and I realized that I just love working when I don’t understand… I don’t have a deep knowledge of musicals as a genre.”
While I do understand his passion for the culture, it certainly doesn’t excuse him for pure laziness and the thought that what you’re doing is correct for a culture that you’ve only understood the Hollywood stereotype for.
Going back to the colors chosen for the musical, from an artistic standpoint, they’re very visually stunning by themselves, however tying into the setting and what the movie is trying to depict, seems to be more of the racist “Mexican orange filter” that every Hollywood critic and producer has seen. The colors were washed out and dull in most settings, such as the hospital where Pérez’s lawyer, Rita Mora Castro, tries to get a doctor to discreetly undergo Pérez’s transition.
This was a pet peeve of mine throughout the movie, not to be helped with the sour songs that felt to be more of a sad joke than to be taken seriously; for instance the infamous “La Vaginoplastia” song that I tried to listen to through, but ultimately felt so disgusted and uncomfortable with how the song tried to portray how Castro was “fighting” for Pérez’s surgery with a homophobic doctor.
Homophobia exists in the real world, and it’s been a key problem in why most LGBTQ+ individuals don’t feel safe with being openly LGBTQ+; however our advances in past years has increased representation in films to many queer orientations and have opened different people’s eyes to the struggles and lives of these men, women and all in-between.
As I was waiting for Emilia Pérez to release, I believed this to be a crucial film to understand the complexities and sensitive parts of transitioning, however I was proven to be very wrong; and I’m not the only one who sees this transgender representation as a step back from what we’ve began to build up over time.
In a video titled “Emilia Perez – A Bizarre and Ignorant Film: Review and Deep Dive,” by YouTuber “My Friends Call Me Pat,” Pat speaks of the absurdity of Perez’s choices after her transition and how she is portrayed right after her surgery.
“…At any rate, Manitas (Emilia) gets the surgery and is literally reborn as the movie portrays it as Emilia Perez, and that is complete with full on Mummy rap and a scene where she inspects her private parts with a makeup mirror. And just once, I would love to see some queer representation with a modicum of subtlety. I don’t think that’s that hard to ask. And frankly, if the director had done even a tiny bit of research, the movie would have been a lot better.”
I completely agree with Pat here; the harsh sighting of Pérez’s entire body being covered with bandages and in dark, bleak orange lighting may be real, however doesn’t paint a pretty picture of a new beginning for critics, but more of a monstrosity to those not understanding the complexities of transitioning.
All in all, I did have great and high expectations for Emilia Pérez originally hearing about it, but instead was met with stereotypes for both trans and Mexican representation and a sorry song listing musical that had me pause just to regain my thoughts and continue watching. At the time of writing this, Emilia Pérez has received two of the 13 Oscars it was nominated for; and honestly, it’s a shame how Hollywood perceives this movie as credible and meaningful to these groups of people.
If you are ever looking for a credible representation of groups you know little or nothing about, please do your research effectively and not end up with a “Hollywood Stereotype” of something you care deeply about.
