Do you remember that one person who would just spit the most outlandish, pedantic, tactless, out-of-topic comment during a conversation, adding nothing more than an outrageous pause to the actual discussion? It was probably Jaques Audiard.
In his avant-garde, genre-breaking and mind-bending 2024 film, “Emilia Pérez,” Audiard makes a shitshow out of his unapologetic arrogance.
The premise could’ve been something truly great — a Mexican drug lord undergoes gender reassignment surgery and mends their wrongdoing, now as a trans woman, accompanied by an empowered female cast.
“No, I didn’t study much, I kinda already knew what I had to understand,” Audiard said — and it shows. If the film director didn’t take the time to think about what he wanted to say, then why say anything at all?
If the “Mexican reality is so powerful that you either have to face it and film it, or you have to break it,” as Audiard puts it, then why didn’t he choose a different setting for his movie? Something more aesthetically pleasing for a French director with the audacity to say that “Spanish is the language of underdeveloped countries, the poor and migrants.”
“In my own language, I’m too attached to the language because I’m an academic,” Audiard said during a talk with Interview Magazine. “Whereas if I don’t speak the language, I have the freedom to just focus on the musicality of the language itself.”
Such a statement has a name: exoticism. It is the fetishization and commodification of ethnic or cultural otherness under Eurocentric standards.
They looked for Mexican actors to portray Mexican characters but found Hollywood household names as the most suitable for the main roles; Emilia’s gender and sex transition arc is reduced to a musical bit centered around vaginoplasty, and breast sizes; and when Emilia screams in rage, it is a deep Macho Mexicano voice that comes from within her— all of these are exoticism.
Audiard is unapologetic about sharing his lack of understanding of Mexico and the trans experience. It’s insulting that his defense mechanism is to say that he worked with a Trans woman as a leading actress and a Mexican support actress who we only see for 15 minutes and thus he has been “authentic.”
“It’s a script that is so alienated from the process of transitioning as a trans woman – and yet blurts falsehoods out with such bold, intense conviction — that you’d think Audiard himself had gone through 500 different gender-affirming surgeries in one sitting,” Amelia Hansford, a reporter for PinkNews said.
The movie, its conception, production and nominations are insulting, especially because they tamper with some of the most difficult processes of people’s lives. This is what exoticism does, it takes the very real experience of non-European, white cis experiences and fetishizes them as the backdrop of a painting or the body of a supermodel — in this case, a 13-Oscars-nominated movie.
Musicalizing the drug war in Mexico and insinuating that flashing someone with their breasts is the only way to show that a character is trans are a few of the out-of-touch directing decisions that Audiard could have kept to himself.
If he didn’t work with LGBTQ+ cast and crew, if he only went to Mexico to publicize his movie, if he “didn’t know anything about Selena and I didn’t know much about Zoe [Saldana] either,” why make a movie about experiences and lives he is so detached from?
There is no conclusion to this conversation, just like there is no conclusion to the movie. As a Mexican audience member, I feel used. Queer film critics can tell a similar story.
We are having a conversation about the importance of representation and respect, cultural appropriation and pink-washing and while this is awesome, these should be primary things to know before making a movie like “Emilia Pérez.”
Thank you Jaques Audiard for making me write yet another article about why you should think before you speak or direct a film. Next time just keep your ignorance to yourself, please.
