“Emilia Pérez” directed by Jacques Audiard, has garnered significant attention in both the film industry and general audiences alike, as it swept through this years Golden Globes.
The film took the lead during the 2025 Golden Globe nominations with ten nods, winning four, with the most notable being Best Motion Picture for a Musical or Comedy and Best Foreign Language Film.
Despite this groundbreaking recognition, the film has faced substantial criticism regarding multiple aspects of the film. Most notable of those being its portrayal of Mexican culture, issues surrounding trans issues and identities, and the overall poor audience feedback for a film that tried to be progressive.
”We had to adapt culture to fit our amazing talent,” says French director Jaques Auidard. While, Auidard’s being of another nationality doesn’t inherently mean producing bad works of another culture, Jaque creates a movie full of nothing but mischaracterization that comes from ignorance.
Having won Best Motion Picture for a Musical, the film seems to have also fallen short in that regard as well. Many viewers have expressed dissatisfaction over the film’s soundtrack and score.
Music within a film is meant to elevate the experience, with musicals needing their songs to be able to push the narrative while also keeping it entertaining and worth watching.
His unoriginal and completely stereotypical depictions of Mexico show the complete and utter ignorance people have towards Hispanic culture and the complexity of the country.
Throughout the movie, it’s heavily inferred that Mexico is a lawless land overridden by gangs, and that it’s up to the people to take back control, more specifically, our white saviors such as Jessi, the love interest who tries to “save” her kids.
The movie follows Emilia, an ex-gang leader, who’s passion after she leaves her life of crime is to help find missing children. The movie brings up sympathy and compassion for the work, making it seem more as if there’s a reason for the violence and these people should be treated with sympathy.
It’s these types of heavily implied themes that lead to the continuation of the exact same cycle this movie tried to break.
The usage of this empathy towards Emilia and her work line, then portraying her as the savior for trying to right her wrongs shows the tone-deaf feeling that Jaques has towards the tragedies that are happening in Mexico and all of Hispanic America.
This tone deaf narrative around the entirety of Hispanic culture shows how diluted and over stereotyped an entire group of Hispanic people has become in the media.
The exclusion of Hispanic culture when discussing diversity has continued to happen within not only a film sense, but also within a literature sense as well.
To learn about inclusion starts within the classroom and seeing as many school districts, including this school, have almost no books regarding Hispanic and Latino culture.
Inclusion begins in the classroom and the fact that there is none within curriculums only breeds exclusion.
Jaques’ tasteless movie shows the reality of not understanding and not being exposed to culture and how it only breeds stereotypes and harmful characters of minorities.
The inclusion of a trans lead in the show is also harmful, portraying it as a simple “Penis to vagina” switch as they say in the movie in reference to Emilia wishing to transition.
It shows a simple and watered down idea of how the trans journey is. Creating a narrative around any trans person having a form of dysphoria and the feelings that come with it.
While “Emilia Pérez” has achieved critical acclaim by critics, much of the general audience has proven to believe otherwise.
The film’s portrayal of Mexican culture, transgender issues, and lack of audience interest, has left people with nothing but annoyance to an already lackluster movie.