Emilia Pérez and the Genre Problem Jacques Audiard Made For Himself

The trajectory of Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez across the 2024 and 2025 festival and awards circuits is one of the more remarkable recent case studies in how critical consensus forms, collapses, and reforms in the space of twelve months. A film that won the Cannes Jury Prize in May 2024 and the shared Best Actress prize for its four female leads arrived at the Academy Awards in March 2025 with thirteen nominations and a specific internet controversy trailing behind it, and left with two wins (Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña and Best Original Song) and a reputation that had, across the intervening months, substantially decayed.

A year and a half on, it is worth asking what the film actually was, and which of the many objections raised against it will hold up.

The shape of the collapse

The outline of the public controversy is now familiar. In early 2025, old social media posts by star Karla Sofía Gascón surfaced in which she had made specifically inflammatory comments about Muslims, George Floyd, and other subjects. Gascón’s subsequent public statements did not contain the damage. The film’s awards campaign, which had been built around her historic status as the first openly trans performer nominated for Best Actress, was effectively abandoned. Netflix pulled her from most of the final awards-circuit appearances. The Gascón controversy became the public story of the film.

There were also, separately, substantive critiques from Mexican critics and audiences about the film’s treatment of Mexican material: a French director, an Afro-Dominican American actress (Saldaña), a Spanish-Dominican actress (Gascón), and a Mexican-American actress (Selena Gomez) making a Spanish-language film about Mexican narcotrafficking and gender transition, shot largely in Paris. The Mexican reception was not uniform, but the dominant strand was specifically negative, and the negativity was specifically about representation and research.

Both strands of the backlash are real. Neither strand is, I think, the most interesting problem with the film.

The formal problem

Emilia Pérez is, structurally, four films stapled together. It is a legal thriller (Rita, a Mexican lawyer played by Saldaña, is hired by a cartel boss to broker an international transition procedure). It is a melodrama of reinvention (the cartel boss, now living as Emilia in Mexico City several years later, attempts to reconnect with her family). It is a political film (Emilia, seeking redemption, founds an NGO to identify the disappeared victims of cartel violence). It is a musical (all of this is sung, in a through-composed score by Clément Ducol and Camille).

Any one of these four films could, in principle, have been a strong film. Audiard’s A Prophet (2009) showed he could handle the criminal world with specific moral seriousness. His Rust and Bone (2012) showed he could handle transformation as melodrama. The musical element is the novelty, and the novelty could have been the unifying formal principle.

It is not. The music in Emilia Pérez is, at best, inconsistently integrated. Some numbers are specifically good: Saldaña’s “El Mal”, which won the Oscar for Best Original Song, is a genuinely powerful second-act showstopper that uses the musical form to dramatise Rita’s specific moral crisis. Other numbers are, by any reasonable measure, clumsy: the early “La Vaginoplastía” sequence, in which a surgeon explains gender-affirming surgery in sung dialogue, is tonally incoherent in a way the film never recovers from.

The broader problem is that Audiard cannot decide whether the musical form is diegetic fantasy (the characters know they are singing), heightened naturalism (the songs express the interior lives of characters who are not performing them), or genre-pastiche (the film is a musical because Audiard has decided musicals are the form for 2024). The confusion is not productive. The form never settles.

The Mexican problem

The film’s treatment of Mexican material is the objection most likely to survive. Emilia Pérez is set in Mexico and is specifically about the cartel violence that has shaped Mexican public life across the last two decades. The film does not, by most accounts from Mexican critics and filmmakers, get the specific cultural texture of that setting right.

This is not an abstract complaint. Specific choices contribute: Spanish dialogue written and edited by non-native speakers, production design that confuses regional specificities, a narrative framing in which the search for the disappeared is presented as a specific act of personal redemption by a cartel leader rather than as the specific collective project it has been in Mexican civil society. A film can, in principle, be made by outsiders about any subject. The question is whether the outsider perspective has been sufficiently checked against the specifically local knowledge. Audiard’s has not been.

Mexican filmmakers Karla Berenice and Issa López, among others, made public statements about the film that are worth reading. The critique is not that outsiders cannot make art about Mexico. The critique is that this specific film makes choices that suggest a specific failure to consult.

Gascón, separately

The Gascón controversy deserves separate treatment, because the two issues (the film’s formal and cultural failures, and its lead actor’s public conduct) have tended to be conflated.

Karla Sofía Gascón’s social media history is indefensible. Her statements during the awards campaign, which included both defensive non-apologies and attempts to deflect criticism onto other nominees, were specifically poorly handled. The costs to her professional prospects will be, and should be, long-lasting.

The question of whether Gascón’s private conduct should retroactively change the reading of her performance in the film is a harder question, and it is one that critical conversation has been inconsistent about. I do not think it should. The performance, on the screen, is the performance on the screen. Gascón’s Emilia is a specifically watchable creation, a specifically controlled piece of screen acting that carries the film’s dramatic centre across its running time. Whether she herself is a person one can admire as a public figure is a separate question that belongs to her, not to the film.

What Saldaña does

The Saldaña performance that the Academy recognised is the thing in the film most likely to survive the film itself. Rita is, in the film’s terms, the character on whose conscience the narrative hinges. Saldaña plays her with a specific moral seriousness that the rest of the film does not always match. Her performance in the song “El Mal” is the specific technical highlight: she sings while executing complex choreography in a crowded political fundraiser, and the camera holds on her as her moral position articulates across the song. This is the sequence in the film that most clearly justifies the musical form.

The Oscar was, in a field without obvious competition, earned on this one sequence alone.

Where it sits

Emilia Pérez, a year and a half on, sits in a specific critical limbo. The film is too formally interesting to be dismissed outright, too formally confused to be fully defended, and too entangled with its specific off-screen controversies to be discussed on purely aesthetic grounds. The Netflix release pattern (a brief theatrical run followed by streaming dominance) means the film is, at this point, primarily a streaming-library curiosity rather than a living theatrical object.

Audiard’s next project, reportedly a lower-budget French-language drama, is the one worth waiting for. His specific formal gifts work best at a scale smaller than Emilia Pérez attempted. Watch the Saldaña number. Skip or endure the rest. The film is a specific case study in how a strong director can overreach, and the overreach is the thing worth learning from.