‘Emilia Pérez’ and the Politics of Cruel Populism

Opinion for The Latino Newsletter

Emilia Pérez is unequivocally, joyfully trashy. But that doesn’t make it trash. The musical narco flick, released by Netflix in late 2024, continues to provoke ample debate. Some critics have found Jacques Audiard’s film satisfying and audacious, bolstered by knockout performances by Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña. Others see the feverish story, set in the monstrous metropolis of Mexico City, as offensive on multiple levels; the film has been deemed insulting both toward the trans community and to Mexico.

While some dislike the film so much that they’ve asked for refunds, social media outlets simply can’t leave the divisive film alone. After all, Emilia Pérez was part of an ambitious Oscar campaign that even included a documentary on the film’s production.

During the past week or so, Audiard’s production has faced a further firestorm of criticism wrapped up with ideas of representation, stereotyping, and prejudice—especially after old, offensive tweets from Karla Sofía Gascón were discovered.

Perhaps the only thing we can agree upon is the film’s success: it has received 13 nominations at the 50th César Awards, including for Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress, with both Gascón and Saldaña earning recognition. The film also triumphed at the European Film Awards, winning five accolades, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actress for Gascón.

The film’s plot, full of twists and turns, is already well-known, even as it continues to attract first-time viewers and inspire internet gossip. Rita Moreno Castro is a jaded lawyer in Mexico, disillusioned by the country’s corruption and the judicial system’s inability to discipline murderers—especially those who commit femicide.

She is enlisted to help “Manitas,” a cruel cartel leader, to stage his own death in order to undergo gender-affirming surgery and start anew. Reborn as “Emilia,” the reformed crime lord strives to reconnect with her wife and children. Eventually, she and Rita combine forces and financial acumen to establish a non-profit called La Lucecita, an NGO aiming to confront violence and bring peace to those whose family and friends who have been disappeared. The film ends with Emilia Pérez dying in a fiery car crash yet being celebrated as a modern-day martyr who fought to eradicate crimes promulgated against women. 

The Popular Culture

Although Emilia Pérez’s focus on drug-related violence may be construed as promoting a profoundly stereotypical view of Mexico —a type of pejorative shorthand meant to render the idea of “Mexico” legible vis-à-vis an international audience— I would argue that, paradoxically, therein lies the film’s strength: Emilia Pérez builds upon the popular culture detritus of everyday Mexico.

The film screens not so much violence, disappearances, and narcos but rather, it represents the way the country understands itself—for both better and for worse. Whether you enjoyed it or not, the film has a lot to say about contemporary politics—both in Mexico and beyond. Perhaps we should say of Emila Pérez what the famed Mexican author said of his novel The Dead Girls: “Some of the events described here are real. All of the characters are invented.” In other words, I believe Audiard’s production captures what literary critic Raymond Williams understood as the “structure of feeling” of our time in that it expresses shifting social values.

The film opens in Mexico City’s darkened, grimy streets where a strap metal collector intones one of Mexico’s ubiquitous jingles: “We buy mattresses, steel drums, refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, microwaves...”

Out of these jumbled words —these used scraps of everyday urban life— emerges one of the first songs of Emilia Pérez. The junk collector’s hymn is transformed into an eerie, extra-diegetic lilt backed by a vocoder. How to render Mexico’s everyday experience into music? 

The first scene takes viewers into a courtroom, where Rita prepares to defend a male client accused of abusing his female partner. It has been suggested that, even here, Audiard fails to understand Mexico. After all, for most of history, Mexico’s judicial system has not been organized around popular juries. But this is only half the story. Since 2008, Mexico’s legal system has undergone significant reforms aimed at transitioning from a predominantly inquisitorial system to a more accusatorial system, similar to that of the United States.

As a result, the judiciary has shifted towards a system where evidence and arguments are presented publicly in court. Furthermore, Mexico has had a sense of what a juried court looks like, perhaps even before famed Mexican comedian Cantínflas turned a courtroom upside down in 1940’s Ahí está el detalle. In this way, Emilia Pérez represents, at the very least, the judicial changes that Mexicans are mulling over. After winning the case, effectively letting an abusive man go free, Rita goes to the washroom, where she asks for a tampon: “Excuse me... Do you have a tampon? I'm in a mess.”

Although not represented in the movie, Audiad’s script calls for Rita to wash blood from her hands after she appears from the stall. The lawyer is quite literally represented as having “blood on her hands”—she, too, is guilty in Mexico’s ongoing cover-up of femicides: some 53,000 reported from 1985 to 2016. 

With the court case finished, Rita received a mysterious call on her cellphone from a gruff voice who did not identify himself. The stranger asks: “Do you want to become very rich? I have a proposal for you. See you at the newsstand in ten minutes.” Rita can’t resist the offer and soon finds herself standing on the street corner next to the agreed-upon location. Her eyes linger over the front pages of the day’s newspapers—the lurid yellow journalism that populates Mexico City’s metro, its avenues, its day after day.

Although Mexico enjoys serious journalism, even the shortest ride on Mexico City’s subway system provides a shocking eyeful of newspapers that sell pure, unadulterated sex and violence. A case in point is El Gráfico, a magazine-style rag sheet that publishes a new iteration of the same old story on a daily basis: on one side of the cover, a scantily-clad model poses provocatively. On the other side of the cover are burnt, disfigured, and strangled bodies—casualties of Mexico’s nagging narco violence.

The headlines themselves are meant to attract attention and leave us questioning if, for some perverse souls, there isn’t something scintillating about dead bodies. In this way, too, Emilia Pérez may not be true to Mexico per se but, at least, the popular culture that haunts Mexican sidewalks. For better or for worse, these are the stories that the public tells about themselves.  

In yet other ways, Emilia Pérez speaks to Mexico’s reality or, at least, the realities of how it is represented. Selena Gómez got a lot of flak for her non-native accent in the film. Nevertheless, the script itself writes this into the plot (she’s from the States), and her turn as Jessi, a drug kingpin’s lover, feels inspired by no one less than Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s lover, Emma Coronel Aispuro, who was also a beauty born stateside but who became narco royalty in Mexico. Emilia Pérez, I would argue, doesn’t so much typecast Mexico as distill the nation’s popular image of itself via a deconstructed musical. It is self-conscious, fun-loving, and delightfully trashy. Suspiciously, something like Fernanda Melchor’s (Netflix’s) Hurricane Season—directed at a less popular, more ‘highbrow’ audience—sidestepped most criticism regarding stereotypical depictions. 

Our Current Politics

I believe that what is most striking about Emilia Pérez is that it captures our current political environment—full of distrust in government, cruel populism, and, yes, even monsters. 

When they first meet, Rita explains to Manitas how it had been reported in the press that he “changed political support last year” and that “the elections proved him right.” After Rita and Manitas, now transformed as Emilia Pérez, start doing politics together, theirs is very much populist politics. They take up the issue of disappearances and femicides in Mexico not via the state but against the state. Emilia explains their NGO, La Lucecita, as “an NGO that acts legally. We do not replace state powers. We work alongside them to support those who need it most…here the judicial police do not have sufficient means to carry out the necessary investigations.”

How can we define our present moment as anything other than an experiment in populism? At times ugly and at times revelatory, the late 2010s and 2020s have seen populist movements take shape around the world. Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) rose to the presidency of Mexico in 2018 as a political outsider, campaigning on a platform of anti-corruption and social justice that resonated with a populace disillusioned by established political parties. In the United States, the ascendance of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders can be understood as a response to growing discontent with the political establishment and the economic inequalities in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Tragically, both Trump and López Obrador have convinced their followers that rolling back the finances of the state will solve issues of inefficiency and corruption.

With La Lucecita, Rita and Emilia epitomize this very same extra-governmental or even anti-governmental political animus. As one U.S. journalist recently put it, “We’re all living in Mexico now. Politically speaking.”

Emilia Pérez is the perfect film to think through not just Mexico and not just the U.S. but rather who we are right now. 

About the Author

Dr. Kevin M. Anzzolin, Lecturer of Spanish, arrived at Christopher Newport University in 2021, where he teaches a wide range of classes. His book, Guardians of Discourse: Literature and Journalism in Porfirian Mexico, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in May 2024.

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