Issue #84: Back From The Dead 🪦
Emilia Pérez + A Complete Unknown
We know. It’s been a while. Thankfully, we’ve been busy in our time away, and now we’re back to guide you through this year’s Best Picture nominees. After all, we’d hate to break tradition.
We’ve got an audacious crop of films in the mix this year. But for now, we’re starting with Cate on the controversial frontrunner Emilia Pérez, then Zosha on the Bob Dylan meditation, A Complete Unknown.
Please enjoy, and welcome back :)
Cate on Emilia Pérez
I’m aware of the new controversy around Karla Sofia Gascon’s racist tweets, but I don’t feel like talking about them engaging with her horrific racism. Consequently they are not considered in this review.
Emilia Pérez is the kind of movie one yearns to enjoy despite the fact that it refuses to let you. The newest project from french filmmaker Jacques Audiard is a musical crime thriller that began its life as an opera — a fact that’s made very clear by the film’s outsized ambitions. But despite its lofty goals, what the audience has been left with is a deeply-offensive attempt at cultural engagement that trivializes every aspect of the story it’s trying to explore.
The film’s plot is simple enough: a young lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldana) is enlisted by “Manitas” (Karla Sofia Gascon) a transgender drug lord, to fake her death, help her complete her medical transition, protect her family, and begin a new life as the woman she knows herself to be. (At this point in the story, she’s already gotten breast implants, which she needlessly flashes to Rita, apparently unfamiliar with modesty.) With two million dollars on the table as payment, Rita complies, then disappears into a new life of her own. Years later, Emilia — now living as the titular character — reappears with a new request: she wants to bring her family back home to Mexico. She’ll pretend to be the cousin of her “old self” and take her ex-wife (Selena Gomez) and their two children in as their benefactor.
In theory, there’s a lot of potential in a story like this. Statistically, there’s bound to be a trans person who is also a drug lord. And a musical to boot? I can’t think of a single thing better suited to become a new queer classic. But the narrative goes off the rails almost immediately, largely by committing the sin that would be needed to make it work — it fundamentally misunderstands the trans experience.
Parallel to the philosophical critiques there are a handful of things to credit the film. The performances by the three leads are genuinely pretty good and worthy of note — even if Selena Gomez’s Spanish is abominable. Zoe Saldana gives us a performance we’ve never seen from her before. The film’s best numbers belong to her, with engaging and precise choreography that bring some focus to the scattershot story. She plays Rita’s underlying fear quite viscerally, precisely as the character demands. Selena, making a clean break from her Disney days, plays the abandoned ex-wife with grit and urgency, determined to reassert her independence in the face of her newfound solitude. Karla Sofia Gascon carries much of the film on her back, with the difficult challenge of generating sympathy for her character while reminding the audience of the life she thinks she’s escaping.
The actual songs are pretty uniformly bad unfortunately, with very little that even approximates a melody. There’s a lot of unnecessary whisper-singing that doesn’t add to the film, and instead leaves the audience confused. But the film’s production design is its biggest strength, and precisely where its imagined aspiration to camp is most at home. The colours are sharp, the camera work is expansive, and the entire enterprise feels pitched for memetic repetition. But that’s where the accolades end.
As a matter of course, the film frames Emilia’s transition as both a becoming and a separation. She’s become the woman she was meant to be, but she’s now left running from “the man she used to be.” And all of that happens through the conspicuous medical transition she undergoes after a catchy but cringeworthy musical number about all the surgeries she must undergo. When she awakens after surgery, the first thing she does is grab a mirror so that she can look between her legs. Audiard invites us to gawk at a trans woman’s body, normalizing impolite curiosity, and condoning it through his character’s own actions. Surgery is not the center of the trans experience. This is, as writer Drew Burnett Gregory put it, cis nonsense.
After her transition, Audiard’s choices reinforce again and again that “Manitas” more or less lurks under the surface of Emilia’s skin, while she fights like hell to keep her hidden. But that is not how identity works! That very idea introduces the decades old transphobic smear that trans women “are really men” on the inside. It lends credence to the suggestion that Emilia transitioned not to become herself, but simply to escape accountability for her bloody actions as the leader of a crime cartel. Essentially, she is lying about her trans identity to fool the people around her. There are few stereotypes as noxious as the insistence that trans people are deceptive by virtue of their very existence. That’s how you end up with a disproportionate risk of murder against trans people — right alongside the trans panic legal defense to justify it.
But unhelpfully, the film more or less requires those interpretations in order to string its plot together. Over and over Emilia’s musical numbers engage with the idea of her “two selves.” “Manitas” stalks her every move. Noticeably, one of the show’s big set pieces has her straining to sing a melody that is a little higher than Gascon’s range, as if to highlight that a man’s register would likely be lower. When Emilia brings her family back to Mexico, she struggles with having to be her children’s aunt rather than their parent. She covertly elicits gossip about their defunct marriage from her ex-wife Jessie (Selena Gomez). And when Jessie informs her that she’s getting remarried, Emilia violently assaults her and threatens to take their children. But worst of all, the register of her voice drops significantly. The violent “Manitas” has broken free, the “man who’s been hiding within her” all this time. Here, Manitas isn’t her old self, she’s her “real” self. And Jessie’s terror is not only understandable, but warranted.
A major plot point of the film is that Emilia funds an NGO aimed at finding the missing family members of the people they’ve left behind. Effectively venerated as a saintly figure, she gains the love and trust of her community. It’s necessary work. But the audience already knows that she’s cleaning up a mess that she contributed to. In her time as a cartel boss, she herself was responsible for many of the deaths and kidnappings she’s now “solving.” She even reconnects with old members of her cartel for leads on where to find the mass graves she presumably sanctioned.
Because of that, it’s hard to solidify where the audience’s sympathies should lie. Emilia is a pillar in her community, a patron to her family and her NGO, and a kind and sympathetic partner to her new girlfriend. But she was also a violent drug dealer who escaped consequences for her crimes. So when Emilia is violently assaulted and killed after being kidnapped herself, the film must undo a narrative knot it can’t untangle. Emilia is our protagonist, but she’s also a villain. In death she suffered the very same fate she subjected so many others to, making it a death she “deserves.” Which means we, as the audience, have come back around to justifying the violent killing of a trans woman of colour — the group most at risk of violence. Audiard’s clumsy handling of this deeply queer story reinforces the very ideas he presumably meant to challenge.
Emilia Pérez’s narrative is so entangled that it’s hard to say if a queer director would have given us something much different that what Audiard has managed to string together. But it does feel safe to say that they might be able to tell a more audacious story that allows trans people to exist as more than mere metaphor.
Zosha on A Complete Unknown
You don’t really get to know Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. That is by design; the musician has spent the entirety of his career trying to evade being too known. Despite rocketing to fame as a folk musician in the 1960s, and a sustained reputation as a sort of artist’s artist, Dylan has maintained an air of enigma, reportedly even going as far as telling co-writer/director James Mangold to insert at least one totally fabricated anecdote to A Complete Unknown (a Dylan tradition really as old as Dylan’s career, at least). This is all well and good; I, personally, love knowing less about celebrities, and think it’s funny when they make things up. I just wish A Complete Unknown let us know anything else.
The biopic starts admirably apocryphal and prophetical: Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) lands in New York with his guitar and heads straight to the Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey to play for his idol Woody Guthrie. His entrance is like a folk second coming; immediately Woody and fellow folk star Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) see his immense talent, and take him under their wing. The stage is set, and the players are drawn into orbit: He makes his open mic debut after a stirring cover of “House of the Rising Sun” by Joan Baez (Monica Barrero). He meets long-time girlfriend Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who pushes him to care about the future and the now of the 1960s, not just the past of folk. He sells out on his first record, and hits pay dirt on his next one.
Facts should feel somewhat beside the point for A Complete Unknown — this is a folk hero, and a hero of folk. From the very opening scene, where Chalamet practically emerges from a divine light, A Complete Unknown wants you to understand the idea of Dylan more than the character of Bob. A Complete Unknown wants to preserve the man, the mystery, the legend at the heart of the story. And so, despite the limited focus of the movie (covering just the first six or so years of his career), it feels bizarrely unfocused. As the movie begins to hinge more and more around the magnetic pull of Dylan (even when he’s a total asshole, as many characters rightfully label him), it becomes less and less clear what it wants to do with that.
A movie like Complete Unknown should feel like watching a cult of personality in motion. But as the film shies further and further away from defining Bob (and, by extension, his draw), the people around him become murkier as well. No one suffers more from this than the women in Dylan’s life; both Joan and Sylvie are painfully two-dimensional, with little to show for their arcs than a few heated scenes with Bob. There’s a number of things that Sylvie could be picking up on when she hears Bob and Joan sing together — they’ve, by this point, already slept together, made music, traded ideas, and known each other in a way that she could never — but the film mostly leaves her revelation locked inside her, turning away from making this too much of her story. It’s the kind of thing that makes you think long and hard about Walk Hard when you should be thinking about how fucking wild it is Dylan exists in the first place.
Were this just a rotely written music biopic, c’est la vie. But the truth this there’s little that makes A Complete Unknown come alive in almost any sense. It feels like a formalistic experiment that’s too anxious to do much boundary pushing at all. There are a few good scenes — Bob defiantly coming out at the Newport festival after releasing a record with electric instruments, or seamlessly sitting down with a blues legend on TV. These are scenes that give you a better sense of what he was, what he was up against, the bizarre miracle of contradictions that he contained. Like Bohemian Rhapsody before it, Complete Unknown is indulgent about its soundtrack — and why not be? Bob Dylan’s music is classic for a reason, and if the movie reminds us of anything it’s that it’s crazy how many of his early career hits could define an entire star on their own, let alone with one guy.
And yet, even its most interesting ideas, like the above Newport scene, feel more interesting in real life, the complexities of a crowd’s reaction rendered to boring mob mentality in the film. I say this as someone with little loyalty to Bob Dylan; it’s just that the ease with which genuine and delicious drama bounces off even a cursory check of real-life events makes the movie feel even more stilted. Who is Bob Dylan? I’m not sure it really matters. The answer is blowing in the wind. The fact of the matter is it shouldn’t matter what the truth is, but it should at least be a good story.
Assorted Internet Detritus
It’s not just you: The internet is getting worse. The good news: Buttons are hopefully making a comeback. One further (more informed) review Zosha read and liked about A Complete Unknown. A wild switched at birth story (with a happy ending). A brief history on “boundaries” — and a good primer on why we should throw them out for “limits.” It can’t be said enough: Thank you David Lynch (for a lot, but) for this performance.
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