Review of Emilia Perez
Film by Jacques Audiard, 2024.
This film was enthusiastically received at Cannes and elsewhere. It calls for smiles, sometimes laughter, and it succeeds in all its bets, almost without seeming to. And it goes further than what it says, what we say and what we see. It's a metaphor, thrown like a paving stone into the pond of a debate that isn't really taking place, in the middle of the simplistic radicalisms and rejections that suffocate and damage it. How does it manage to deal so powerfully, in the mode of laughing and singing, of enchanting without eliding a question as serious and astonishing as the one our century is going through concerning sex? With the evolution of what we call sex relations, it takes on its strangest, most acute aspect, in what, thanks to social evolution and technical and scientific progress, surgical as much as civic possibility, consists in changing sex. How is it possible to deal so deeply, so abruptly, with such real and fundamental questions, while dancing, while singing, while laughing? How can this film grab us and hold us for two hours, giving us the rare pleasure of treating it so well and laughing at the same time, on so many different, so distant levels, without sacrificing any of them, without levelling them, without ridiculing any of them? The commentaries elide it by presenting it as a farce of no consequence, albeit successful, as a theme just for laughs, albeit with talent, this vow of transition, this transsexual destiny of a Mexican drug trafficker, the worst there is, after having massacred multitudes with a determination and efficiency as ferocious as the one he has for accumulating fortunes. Yet there's an underlying debate that cuts through the screen, as this most accomplished representative of absolute evil has always wanted to become female, and has always known he was destined to do so, and from there will set about repairing the evil he has done, in a country where the murder of women is legion, and beats sordid numerical records. This body, dedicated as a man to the absolute devastation of others, now wants to be a woman, dedicated to repairing this devastation! How can we fail to see in this a modern myth, a serious fable, a rite, a legend, a parable, of what the organon of sex in what we call transsexuality questions today, with its instrument of possibilities? In Emilia Perez, the suffering path that each protagonist usually follows is given a vast dimension of redemption for what one sex has done to the other since the dawn of patriarchal times. At the very moment when this historical fate is appeasing and receding in Western societies, but coming back even more strongly, like a ferocious, grotesque parody, in lands that choose and suffer it, where these discourses that have for so long made their most common error the law, are calling for its revival, for a blind devastation, in the face of the failure they are encountering today, Emilia Perez sings and dances the political debate that the transsexual phenomenon does not in fact raise. This political debate is rare in these transitions, from man to woman or from woman to man. And yet, how could it not exist beyond what is said and what is known, moving into the depths of discourse? How could they forget that to go towards the man is to leave behind a pain suffered as a woman, while to go towards the woman is, for Emilia Perez, to partially repair the damage done as a man? That's why the film goes so far, extending to the paradigm the singular, almost jubilant destiny of this killer-turned-redemptrix. Of course, it doesn't all end well, and in the end, this redemption ends up stumbling on fatherhood, which, threatened by the loss of its progeny, returns to the reflex of depriving the other of its resources. Is this an interpretation of these fundamental questions of the unconscious, which like politics binds and opposes men to each other, but first and foremost men to women? No matter! The point of this work is not to come up with solutions, but to ask radical questions that are not well asked in the so-called human sciences. Bravo for this exceptional vision that Jacques Audiard knows how to distill and direct, and which he accompanies even more with this benevolent neutrality that makes him choose a transgender actress to incarnate this role, a vision that illuminates us and touches us so deeply.