Inside The Backlash And Response

“Emilia Perez” is quickly becoming an awards show favorite, raking in four Golden Globee wins and 13 Oscar nominations — plus SAG Award nods, too.

The sweeping Spanish-language operatic musical defies easy categorization, as star Karla Sofía Gascón told Netflix’s Tudum blog in January.

“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,” she said.

Gascón plays dual roles in the gritty film: first, that of Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a murderous Mexican gang leader who dreams of living openly as a woman.

The cartel kingpin recruits a lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), to help her fake her own death and secretly obtain gender-affirming care — and at last, her new, authentic self, Emilia Pérez, is born.

However, Emilia cannot completely escape her violent origins, and when her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) comes back into the picture, past and present collide in tragic ways.

Some critics and filmmakers have raved about the Spanish-language musical, with Variety calling the movie “dazzling” and director Michael Mann calling it a “contemporary masterpiece.”

However, many viewers have criticized the movie for its lack of cultural authenticity.

Some have asked why the movie, which is helmed by a French director, Jacques Audiard, was not filmed in Mexico despite being set there, and features no Mexican leads. Per the Hollywood Reporter, most of the movie was filmed on a sound stage in Paris, save for five days of exterior shots in Mexico. Others have criticized the language skills of Gomez, who is not fluent in Spanish.

And the movie’s approach to transgender representation is considered, by some, “a step backward,” as GLAAD put it.

Keep reading to learn more about some of the controversies surrounding “Emilia Pérez.”

The director says he ‘didn’t study much’ about Mexico while making the film

Some viewers have questioned why the film was directed by Jacques Audiard, who is French and doesn’t speak Spanish, he confirmed to the New York Times.

Audiard also faced criticism when he said did not do much research on Mexico while making the film.

“How much did you have to study Mexico to be able to make this film?” an interviewer asks him in a clip making the rounds on social media.

“I didn’t study much,” Audiard says through a translator, according to a translation by NBC News. “What I had to understand, I knew,” he says in French.

“Emilia Pérez” won four Golden Globes on Jan. 5, including two best picture awards in the musical/comedy and non-English language categories, which sparked controversy online.

“Frenchman — who speaks no Spanish or English — wins award for France for a film in Spanish, based in Mexico but filmed in France, about a Mexican cartel leader,” Mexican American journalist Tomás Mier wrote on X the day after the Golden Globes.

Mexican actor and singer Mauricio Martínez also criticized Audiard’s self-admitted lack of research about Mexico for the film, and slammed the movie in an X post for “portraying a Mexico full of stereotypes, ignorance (and) lack of respect.”

Film critic Ana Iribe also took issue with the movie’s lack of research and the way it portrayed violence in Mexico.

“It’s the lack of info that makes it insensitive: we don’t want a white French director to portray the violence we have to face every day,” she wrote on X. “I’m not opposed to foreign artists making films about other countries, as long as they have good research, and EMILIA PÉREZ didn’t have that.”

The movie is set in Mexico but most of the cast is not Mexican

While “Emilia Pérez” takes place in Mexico, the film’s leads are not Mexican. 

Karla Sofía Gascón, who plays Emilia, is from Spain, Zoe Saldaña, who plays Rita, is from the U.S. with Dominican and Puerto Rican ancestry, and Selena Gomez is from the U.S. with Mexican and Italian heritage.

In one notable exception, supporting cast member Adriana Paz, who plays Emilia’s lover, Epifanía, is from Mexico.

Paz defended the movie in an interview with IndieWire.

“I’ve heard people saying it’s offensive to Mexico. I really want to know why, because I didn’t feel that way. And I have questioned some people that I trust, not just as artists but as people, and they don’t feel that way, so I am trying to understand,” Paz said, adding that she feels the movie’s director is a “genius.”

In November, casting director Carla Hool said during a SAG-AFTRA panel she and her team “did a big search” for actors across Mexico, the United States, Spain and “all Latin America” but did not find any Mexican actors suitable for the main roles.

“We wanted to keep it really authentic but at the end of the day, the best actors who embodied these characters are the ones that are right here,” she said, gesturing to Gascón, Gomez and Saldaña on the panel beside her. “So we had to figure out how to adjust authenticity … with the accents, and them not necessarily being native Mexican.”

The lack of Mexican stars in the movie was met with criticism on social media.

One X user called the film “ridiculous” and said it was a “European movie with hollywood stars that pretend to be mexican, with harmful stereotypes.”

Another X user criticized the movie’s lack of Mexican stars and called the film “a parody, a mockery of Mexico.”

Mexican director and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto also questioned why the film did not include more Mexican people behind the camera.

“Why not hire a Mexican production designer, costume designer, or at least some consultants?” he said in a November Deadline interview. “Yes, they had dialogue coaches but I was offended that such a story was portrayed in a way that felt so inauthentic.”

He also said the film included mistakes that could have been avoided if more Mexican people were involved in the production.

“You would never have a jail sign that read ‘Cárcel,’” he said of a sign shown on a building in the movie. “It would be ‘Penitenciaria.’ It’s just the details, and that shows me that nobody that knew was involved. And it didn’t even matter. That was very troubling to me.”

Selena Gomez’s Spanish-language acting has been criticized

Controversy arose over Selena Gomez’s Spanish language skills in “Emilia Pérez.” Gomez’s character is Mexican and grew up in the U.S., with family there.

Mexican actor and comedian Eugenio Derbez made headlines in December when he called Gomez’s Spanish “indefensible” in a clip from the “Hablando de Cine Con” podcast shared on TikTok.

“I feel like she doesn’t know what she’s saying,” host Gaby Meza also said on the podcast. “If she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she can’t give her acting any nuance.”

Gomez responded to these criticisms in a comment on the TikTok post.

“I understand where you are coming from..I’m sorry I did the best I could with the time I was given,” she wrote.

Amid backlash, Derbez then issued an apology to the “Only Murders in the Building” star.

“Dear Selena, I truly apologize for my careless comments — they are indefensible and go against everything I stand for,” he wrote on TikTok. “As Latinos, we should always support one another. There’s no excuse. I was wrong, and I deeply admire your career and your heart.”

Gomez grew up speaking Spanish but “lost” the language when she started taking mainly English-speaking acting jobs at age 7, she told NPR in November. 

She said in an interview at the Cannes Film Festival that she is “not as happy with what I feel like I could have done in Spanish,” but said she hoped “it doesn’t hinder my performance.”

Some people have defended Gomez’s use of Spanish in the film.

Annie Abbott, a professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois, argued that the criticism of Gomez mirrors the judgment sometimes experienced by heritage speakers — i.e., people with a Latino cultural and familial background who are not formally fluent in Spanish — from native Spanish speakers.

“Gomez is critiqued for experiencing the typical challenges of heritage speakers while being held to native speaker standards — a no-win situation that a rapidly growing number of Americans can relate to,” Abbott wrote in a recent opinion piece for The Fulcrum.

A 2023 study from the Pew Research Center found that 24% of U.S. Latino adults say they carry on a conversation in Spanish “a little or not at all.”

According to the study, 54% of U.S. Latinos who say that only speak a little Spanish “say another Hispanic person has made them feel bad for it.”

However, one commenter on X responding to Abbott argued that the issue wasn’t with Gomez’s language ability or identity, but with the fact that her Spanish skills did not match the demands of her role in “Emilia Pérez.”

“The author misses the point completely. This has nothing to do with racism. Selena Gomez should be proud of her Spanish,” the X user wrote. “But her accent doesn’t match the character that she plays in the movie. And that’s very distracting for viewers who know exactly how Mexicans speak.”

Director Audiard has addressed issues with the actors’ varying Spanish accents in the movie.

“Throughout the shoot we had problems, for instance, with Selena’s accent in Spanish. She is Texan. Karla Sofía Gascón speaks Castilian Spanish. She’s from Madrid,” he told The New York Times in November. “Given that I don’t speak Spanish, the nuances of the Mexican accent versus the Castilian were lost on me. We had all these problems with accents, but we fixed them in the edit. We did a lot of dubbing.”

Some argue the movie perpetuates harmful trans stereotypes

Some viewers have criticized the movie’s depiction of trans people and the trans experience.

GLAAD, the LGBTQ advocacy group formerly known as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, called “Emilia Pérez” a “step backward for trans representation” and said the film “recycles the trans stereotypes, tropes, and clichés of the not-so-distant past.”

Some critics say the film perpetuates the harmful narrative that transitioning is a form of lying. Emilia keeps her past a secret from her wife, posing as Manitas’ aunt.

“Its protagonist’s transition is seen as duplicitous and dishonest, an act of manipulation through which she continues her selfish attempts to control those that she abandoned,” Mattie Lucas wrote in a November review for Trans | Cendental Cinema. 

“Not only is her transition portrayed as more of a disguise to evade the authorities, it’s an act of continued selfishness that ends up destroying not only her own life, but the lives of those she loves,” Lucas added.

Film critic Juan Barquin called the movie “a regressive picture masquerading as progressive” and criticized the way masculinity and femininity were portrayed in the film. 

“Any time Emilia ‘reverts’ to her ‘old ways,’ Gascon lowers her vocal register as if to equate masculinity with evil and femininity with good,” Barquin wrote for Little White Lies magazine.

Reviewer David Opie echoed this criticism, pointing to a scene when Emilia throws her wife Jessi onto a bed “and threatens her using the same low, masculine voice she used pre-surgery.”

“It’s as if the so-called ‘evil’ in Emilia is a separate entity, the ‘man’ she was raised to be, rather than her being the same person going through a transitional journey,” Opie wrote for Yahoo! Movies.

Several critics and viewers, including Barquin, also took issue with one line from the movie in which Emilia describes herself as “half male, half female.”

Some transgender commentators shared counterpoints to these arguments and defended the film’s representation of its trans protagonist.

Journalist and critic Mey Rude, who is trans, rejected the argument that Emilia uses a “male voice” in moments of anger.

“She simply is a woman with a lower register, and when she gets angry, it shows,” Rude wrote in a piece for Out Magazine. “If you listen to the scenes where Gascón is playing the character as Manitas, you can clearly hear a difference in the voice she uses in the fight scene with Gomez.”

Rude also argues that the film does not lean into “harmful trans tropes about trans women being deceptive or liars.”

“Emilia isn’t a liar because she’s trans, she’s a liar because she’s a bad person and she’s in many ways, afraid,” she wrote. “The movie shows that if you live a lie, whether you’re trans or not, your lies will catch up with you.” 

Writer Julie River, who is trans, argues in a piece for Out Front magazine that Emilia is portrayed sensitively as a “morally complex” character who makes “a desperate attempt to atone for her sins in her former life.”

River also argues that Emilia hides her transition not because the movie is painting trans people as duplicitous, but because as a cartel leader, Emilia “was hardly surrounded by people who were easy to come out to or who were likely to accept her transition.”

“I may be amongst the minority in the LGBTQ+ community doing this, but I’ll be applauding it for every award it wins,” River wrote.

Gascón herself has pushed back at people calling her “Emilia Pérez” character transphobic.

“There are some that say, ‘I want to see LGBTQ or trans characters outdoing what people do in real life,’ but we do bad things too … I don’t understand the criticism about the representation of portraying Emilia Pérez this way,” she told Vanity Fair in January. “The reality is that the trans experience is not the same for everybody — my trans experience is different from somebody else’s.”

“If you don’t like it, go and make your own movie,” Gascón also said. “Go create the representation you want to see for your community.”