Listen to this note:
It was Wednesday and we decided to use the cinema discount to go see Emilia Perez, which I still didn't know much about, but the comments about it were already starting to filter through my social networks. Most of them were negative towards the film, while others, although much less, said that it was a good film. I was surprised that several people commented that they had felt offended by seeing it and that many others had even demanded a refund from the cinema, after feeling cheated. So, in the middle of all that controversy, my partner and I found ourselves in the almost empty cinema, with popcorn and soda in hand.
The big screen lit up and after twenty long minutes of commercials, the image of a mariachi appeared and the background cry of the old iron, so characteristic of Mexico City.. I immediately thought of the generic nature of that image, used over and over again by foreigners to define Mexican culture and identity.
After that, a woman who works as a lawyer, who, after a suspicious call, is kidnapped at a newspaper stand by what we assume are drug traffickers. Now in what seems to be a far away place from Mexico City, the lawyer finds herself in front of “Manitas”, a powerful drug dealer who asks her for help in exchange for his desire to change her sex and with it her life. The lawyer is always calm.
“El Manitas” without using a gram of violence and almost moved to tears with the photo of his children and his wife in his hands. Outside, trucks with loud music, technicolor lights and criminals watching the alliance between the drug trafficker and the lawyer who, after several dances and songs, manages to make “El Manitas” achieve her transition to being Emilia Pérez.
As the film progressed, I felt increasingly angry and offended, because what I was seeing had not a grain of truth. That is to say, since the so-called war on drugs promoted in 2006 by then-President Felipe Calderón, we know that criminal groups and drug trafficking networks operate in the most cruel and violent ways. That citizens live in fear of going out and being part of the thousands of forced disappearances that we see on the news every day. And that the scenarios shown in the film are rather very unbelievable stage sets of the environments in which they intend to tell the story of a subject that deeply affects us: organized crime.
By this time I was barely holding onto my popcorn and was instead starting to make disapproving comments about what I was watching. But there was a decisive moment when I couldn't take it anymore. It was the scene where victims are seen singing and asking for help for their families, followed by a scene showing faces of missing people against a black background, while Emilia Perez redeems herself from her past as a hitman, to now build a help center for the poor victims, while singing to them that she will be their savior.
After this scene, my partner and I turned to look at each other in a knowing gesture that revealed that I was not the only one who felt uncomfortable. We stood up from our seats and left the room.
Emilia Perez It does not connect with reality—not even with its musical themes and dances that pretend to be protests—about the problems that organized crime and gender bring with them, as fiction often does in art to make us think through its characters or stories, about possibilities that we had not seen before on various topics. Rather, the fictional project by French film director Jacques Audiard shows a Manichean representation of reality through its main character, and evidences from the first moment a narrative that ignores, trivializes, desensitizes and minimizes the complexity of a problem that to this day has left more than 100 thousand people missing in our country.
That a creator believes that, from his arrogance and ignorance, he can deceive his viewer through his artifices, is an insult to those of us who live in contexts of violence. In addition to the fact that through a cultural product such as this, Emilia Perez, narratives are perpetuated that are extremely dangerous for the reality in which we live, where the political extreme right positions itself under racist, classist and power discourses that dissolve the consequences that organized crime and drug trafficking bring with them, such as migration.
I think that recognizing what a cultural product like a movie, a song or a book makes us feel is fundamental to identifying ourselves within our own thinking; that several people criticize Emilia Perez from their own experience through comments on social networks and expressing that they felt offended, angry or scammed, reflects beyond the preferences and tastes of each viewer, part of the positioning and thinking of a society that recognizes when fiction itself deceives it about its context.
It reflects a critical society, which discerns between what is apparent comedy and what borders on an offense to its culture, its identity and its collective memory.
At the end of the day I came home with a bad taste in my mouth and an almost full container of Takis Fuego popcorn, but with the joy of knowing that I live in a critical country that does not keep quiet when someone tries to lie to it about its own reality.
More from the author: Joan Didion, the writer who was discarded by Stanford University.
