Trying To Save Emilia Pérez From Itself: On Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez

When a film has been widely condemned and derided, it can create within one an illogical hope that the movie is actually good. And I, the genius, am the only one to see its goodness and I will bravely present my contrarian take and convince everyone they have been wrong. I was kind of hoping this would be true for Emilia Pérez, but about ten minutes into the film I realized this was unlikely to work out, and what I would be left restating was everyone has said. Emilia Pérez! What the fuck?! Let’s just get some stuff out of the way. It’s the story of a violent Mexican narco who fakes his death, goes to Israel for surgery to transition as a woman, attempts to regain a connection to her children, and tries to atone for her past by establishing a nonprofit to help those whose lives have been impacted by narco violence. It’s a French production set in Mexico with almost zero Mexican people working on the film. Also it’s a musical. And on Netflix.

A Tepid Search for Genius: On Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne

“One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.” Sheila Heti wrote this line in her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? and a thousand well-behaved girls who treat their art like it’s going to affect their grade point average underlined it, posted it to their Tumblr, and fervently whispered into the pages, “Me.”

The last fifteen years or so have been ardently dedicated to figuring out what a woman genius looks like. Much of this has focused on digging through the past, trying to trace matrilineal pathways in and around the artistic canon. Publishing, art museums, historians, and film scholars have sought out “rediscovered voices” to exploit and establish. While much of this work has been invigorating, the backward glance toward the overlooked, the forgotten, and the inappropriately maligned has given our culture a nostalgic feel, one lacking in vigor and direction.