Sinful Sunday: "Emilia Pérez," Queer Villainy, and the Subversion of "Bury Your Gays"
Jacques Audiard's new film uses its title character's trans journey to tell a story that's truly operatic in its emotional intensity.
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Welcome to “Sinful Sundays,” where I explore and analyze some of the most notorious queer villains of film and TV (and sometimes literature, depending on my mood). These are the characters that entrance and entertain and revolt us, sometimes all three at the same time. As these queer villains show, very often it’s sweetly good to be bitterly bad.
Emilia Pérez is one of those films that I was really looking forward to seeing. I mean, how can you not look forward to a film that bills itself as a musical examining the life of a drug lord who hires a lawyer so she can have gender affirming care and live her truest life? Directed by Jacques Audiard, it features a true embarrassment of riches when it comes to its cast, which includes such heavy hitters as Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Karla Sofía Gascón as the title character. Suffice it to say that, given the tragic and deeply operatic story, the cast, and the fact that it’s a musical, I absolutely loved it.
When the film begins Saldaña’s Rita Mora Castro is working as a lawyer, but it's clear from the beginning that she doesn’t love her life or her career. Thus, when drug lord Juan "Manitas" Del Monte summons her and offers her a fortune in exchange for help getting gender affirming surgery. Once this is accomplished Manitas lives as Emilia Pérez but, finding that she can’t live without her children, she once again enlists Rita’s aid. After she invites her former wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) into her house she goes to increasingly extreme, and dangerous, lengths to regain custody of them, with tragic consequences for everyone involved.
Now, I know that it has raised the hackles of some, and I can honestly see why. At first blush it does seem to fall into the pernicious trap that is so common in media: i.e., the “bury your gays” trope. After all, at the end of the film the title character–along with her former wife and her former wife’s lover–all die in a fiery car crash, leaving Emilia to be memorialized by Rita (who has likewise taken custody of her children). At the same time, I personally found the operatic nature of the story so compelling, and Gascón’s inhabiting of such a complex and morally ambiguous so utterly entrancing, that I was willing to take the good with the bad. And, when it comes down to it, I’m not sure what else we would expect from a film that focuses on a drug lord, even if she is also a trans woman.
In any case, there’s no denying that Emilia is a captivating presence, and that’s true from the first moment that we meet her, when she is still Juan "Manitas" Del Monte. Even in these early moments it’s clear that “Manitas” is firmly enmeshed in a world and a mindset governed and circumscribed by violence and by its enactment on others, and the threat of death or worse hangs over Rita during their first meeting. At the same time, there’s also a world of hurt lurking behind those eyes. This is a person, after all, who has long had to labor under an assumed identity, masquerading as a man when she knows in her heart that she is a woman, and Gascón is truly a marvel at bridging out these layers of her personality. Her songs express her bottomless yearning to escape both her old body and the prison of her old life.
At first, it seems as if Emilia’s surgery has utterly transformed her. She’s beautiful and sexy and wealthy, and she seems to be living her best life in Europe. Beneath the surface, however, she is still unhappy, because despite it all she doesn’t have her children with her and, as the film enters its second half, her relentless desire to have her children in her care is the thing that will motivate many of her actions for the rest of the film, for good and for ill. All it takes is for Jessi to threaten to take them away for her to lapse into her old ways, and her violent assault on her former wife is terrifying because it shows how deeply Emilia has been scarred by her time as a drug lord. It also shows just how little it takes for her to resort to her old ways and how, despite the fact that she now inhabits the female body she knows is her right form, she can’t leave the old male codes of dominance and brutality completely behind.
All of this isn’t to say that there aren’t moments of remarkable tenderness. In one particularly remarkable scene, Emilia bonds with one of her sons, who seems to recognize in her scent an echo of the father he believes to be dead. It’s sweet and actually a little heartbreaking, marking one of the few islands of peace in a film in which violence always seems to lurk in the background. It finds its echo in Emilia’s fledgling relationship with Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz), who learns from Emilia that her abusive husband was killed by drug lords. Likewise, Emilia’s use of her wealth to create a foundation devoted to finding the bodies of those killed in drug wars is clearly her attempt to make good on her former violent life.
Yet such is the narrative trajectory of tragic opera that the title character’s actions ultimately end up leading to her downfall. Emilia has made the fatal, hubristic error of so many other tragic heroes/villains, thinking that her power and wealth entitles her to speak and do as she likes, hence her resorting to violence to try to bully Jessi into giving up their children and hence the latter’s resort to even greater violence to keep her from doing so. Of course, it’s all very complicated and messy because Jessi has no idea that the woman who has taken her in and has been masquerading as a cousin is in fact the person to whom she was married. Talk about tragedy!
Fortunately–or unfortunately, depending on how you view such things–the two do have one last moment of rapprochement before the end, and Selena Gomez deserves all the praise for the way that she conveys her character’s anguish and agony once she realizes that she has kidnapped and brutalized is in fact the person she always loved. It’s a moment of recognition that is pure melodrama. It’s beautiful and devastating, made all the more acute by the fact that it’s Jessi’s actions which ultimately sends the car careening into its fiery demise, taking Emilia along with it. In the end, Emilia becomes a sort of icon, in her death bringing a peace that she could never quite accomplish in life.
For me, what all of this adds up to is a remarkably complex portrait of a villain who yearns to escape both her body and her former life as a monster but who constantly feels herself drawn back into that dark and turbulent world. In the end, like all great tragic villains she is brought low not, as one might assume, by her identity as a trans woman, but instead by her enduring belief that violence and sheer force of will are enough to get her what she wants. In that sense, Emilia Pérez manages to play with the trope in which it partakes and, in so doing, shows that even the most pernicious of storytelling strategies can be turned against themselves and used to tell a larger point about the nature of power and violence.