Last night my wife and I finished watching Emilia Pérez on Netflix. We loved the movie, which won four Golden Globe awards this year and likely will be nominated for many Oscars.
We tried to imagine what the pitch would have been to movie studios. "Hey guys, we want to make a film about a man who is a vicious Mexican drug lord, but whose dream is to become a transgender woman. It will be largely in Spanish with English subtitles and feature lots of singing and dancing."
Yeah, right, not going to happen seemingly would have been the typical response. Yet Jacques Audiard, writer and director, did succeed in making the movie -- which blends the genres of a musical, drama, and thriller.
I found the song lyrics deeply moving, especially those in which cartel kingpin Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, played by transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón, expresses his deep desire to be who he truly is, a woman, before he dies.
Basically Manitas is saying, I want to truly live before I die. Which is how almost everybody feels. Yet often we don't reveal to others, or maybe even to ourselves, what our innermost nature genuinely is.
Before I watched Emilia Pérez, I was very sympathetic to transgender people who undergo gender-affirming care. After seeing the movie, even more so. Manitas has to go through a huge amount of trouble, making tremendous sacrifices, to become the person he feels himself to be.
This is the power of movie-making. Watching a marvelously-made film about someone transitioning from a man to a woman had much more of an emotional effect on me than all of the news stories I've read about transgender people and gender-affirming care.
Yes, the director apologized after Mexican outrage over Emilia Pérez, which was made in Spain. And he's come in for criticism from a LGBTQ group. But I think critics of the movie are missing what really counts about it: how we humans can have an intense desire to be true to ourselves that compels us to make great sacrifices to that noble end.
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