Emilia Pérez: France's official Oscar entry is an ode to the agony of gender dysphoria

“I want another face, another skin. I want the depth of my soul to smell like honey. I don’t desire desire. I don’t desire to be desired. Let everything that was no longer be. My only desire is to be a her,” asserts Juan ‘Manitas’ Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a Mexican narco gangster before he undergoes gender-affirmation surgery in Emilia Pérez, France’s official entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars, which swept the board with four wins at the 2025 Golden Globes on Sunday (January 5), beating Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light in the Best Motion Picture (Non-English Language) category. A haunting, lyrical ode to the quiet agony of gender dysphoria and a meditation on the audacity of selfhood, Emilia Pérez — Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language experimental prose-poem of a crime musical, loosely adapted from Boris Razon’s 2018 novel Écoute — is likely to be one of the most talked about films at the 97th Academy Awards, which will be held on March 2.

When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, Emilia Pérez received a standing ovation that lasted for minutes. It also won the Jury Prize, with the film’s four leading women, Karla Sofía Gascón, Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz sharing the award for Best Actress. Gascón herself made history as the first transgender woman to win Best Actress at the festival for her portrayal of Emilia ––­­­­ a revelation. It was a tough role in a film that bends genres. As Gascón said in an interview: “You have an action movie that’s not an action movie, a drama that’s not a drama, a comedy that’s not a comedy.” A former telenovela star with a life lived publicly as a man, Gascón transitioned in 2018, with her ex-wife and teenage daughter by her side. “The biggest thing [Pérez and I] share is our refusal to accept losing the people we love,” she told Vogue. “Manitas, Emilia, and I — we’re born from the hatred of others, and that hatred has shaped us.”

The past is not the past

Gascón’s Emilia is tender and ferocious, a woman who has shed her past as a kingpin who fakes his own death but still smells of it. In a heartbreaking scene after he returns to live with his two sons and ex-wife Jessi Del Monte (Gomez), as she puts one of her sons, who still remembers his last hug, to sleep, he confronts his 'aunt': “You smell like my papa.” He smelt like mountains, leather, coffee, sugar, the engine of the car, cocoa, light, lemon, ice cubes, sweat. Of little pebbles, hot from the sun. Like grass. Like mezcal and guacamole. Like dogs on car rides. Like cigars. Emilia, on the other hand, smells like love and grief all at once; the past clings and refuses to let go, no matter how far she runs or how much she transforms. “Papa. Papa. Papa,” sings the son before he drifts off to sleep. The word stretches, breaks, and folds back on itself. It is both accusation and lullaby, both wound and balm. Music becomes the film’s language for what cannot be said.

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Emilia’s arc forms the backbone of the film. As Juan Del Monte, she was a feared cartel leader, a figure whose identity was constructed entirely around dominance and control. As Emilia, she is vulnerable, yearning, and searching for freedom — qualities that the world around her views as weakness. Audiard does not portray this transition as a straightforward liberation. Instead, it is steeped in contradictions: Emilia’s assertion of selfhood is as much an escape as it is an act of atonement. The film’s exploration of gender affirmation steers clear of an emotional reclamation. The moment when Emilia first sees her reflection post-surgery is unsentimental.

Audiard’s direction, coupled with Clément Ducol’s understated score, ensures this scene resonates as the start of a new chapter, loaded with the uncertainty of how her world will receive her. Rita Mora Castro, played with finesse by Zoe Saldaña, is the pragmatic foil to Emilia’s idealism. An underappreciated lawyer ground down by years of defending the indefensible, Rita’s decision to help Emilia is less about morality and more about survival. However, as their partnership develops, Rita’s own vulnerabilities come to the fore. Manitas enlists Rita to flee Mexico for the surgery, which allows her to change life, leaving everything behind. But Audiard’s film spirals outward, using Emilia’s quest as a lens to examine themes of personal freedom, guilt, and the sacrifices that choosing oneself over the roles imposed by society entail. The other women represent a different facet of the struggle for agency and self-fulfilment. Adriana Paz’s Epifanía represents the collateral damage of Emilia’s former life.

Articulating the inarticulable

As a cartel leader, Emilia’s actions caused irreparable harm to many, including her wife Jessi and their children. The film does not absolve Emilia of this guilt. Instead, it examines the tension between the possibility of redemption and the inescapable weight of one’s history. Can a person truly reinvent themselves, or are they forever tethered to the consequences of their past? 

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A defining feature of Emilia Pérez is its integration of musical sequences, a stylistic choice that elevates the film’s emotional resonance. The songs, written by Camille, act as both narrative devices and emotional expositions, offering insights into the characters’ psyches that dialogue alone cannot convey. These musical interludes are not traditional set-pieces but visceral, almost surreal explorations of emotion; melody replaces words to articulate the inarticulable. While these sequences may alienate some audiences, they are essential to the film’s structure. Audiard uses music not as an embellishment but as a means to deepen the film’s exploration of its themes. Damien Jalet’s choreography turns these moments into visual and emotional spectacles.

The film challenges the romanticised notion of transition, presenting it instead as a process fraught with compromise and consequence. Emilia’s transformation, while it’s empowering, does not erase the scars of her past or the impact of her actions on those around her. The film’s most poignant scenes are those that confront this tension directly. The final act, which culminates in a tragedy, underscores the impossibility of fully escaping one’s past. Perhaps the film’s most profound question is not whether Emilia is redeemed but whether she is loved. Can love survive transformation? Can it endure the erasure of what once was? “Life without love has been an endless fall,” says Adriana Paz’s Epifanía, a widow whose life has been upended by cartel violence. And maybe that is all that can be said. That love, in all its fractured, haunted forms, is the thing we fall toward — even as we fall away.