Despite my love of musicals and crime dramas, I had reservations about “Emilia Pérez” and not because of the transgender issues. My first hesitation was because this was a French filmmaker making a film about Mexico, but not set in Mexico.

The Paris-born Jacques Audiard wrote and directed the film, loosely inspired by a chapter from a French writer’s (Boris Razon) novel. The film begins with a bored and often under-appreciated Mexico City lawyer, Rita Mora Castro, (Zoe Saldaña) who is invited by the head of a cartel, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, (Karla Sofía Gascón) into a world of the rich. All she has to do is help in making him disappear as he’s reborn a woman after a gender-affirming surgery. Castro consuls with doctors until she finds one who will perform the surgery. Del Monte’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), believing herself a widow, takes their kids and resettles in Switzerland.

Del Monte becomes the titular Emilia Pérez and four years later, meets Castro and asks her to help re-unite Pérez with her kids. That brings complications, and even though Pérez and Castro also work to find and identify the bodies of cartel murder victims, Pérez can’t escape his past and that effects her future.

While the film did have a strong start after winning awards at Cannes Film Festival–winning the Jury Prize and Best Actress award at its world premiere and then winning four Golden Globe awards, it has been plagued with issues about representation, language and even racism.

According to WorldOfReel.com, the director said: “Spanish is a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.”

Writing for Left Voice Óscar Fernández, noted:

Scandalously, director Jacques Audiard, a Frenchman (who speaks neither Spanish nor English), when asked how much he studied Mexico to make the film, declared: “No, I didn’t study much. I kinda already knew what I had to understand.”

This is a point that I wondered about. How well the director knew Mexico and the difference between Mexico and Spain or other countries. How would the director or casting director understand the differences, an important issues with a film totally in Spanish and meant for an international audience. Fernández also  noted: 

Another issue that has caused controversy is the Spanish pronunciation of Selena Gomez, who openly claims to be Latina and to be proud of her heritage. Actor and comedian Eugenio Derbez called her performance “indefensible.” He said, “I was with people at the movie theater, we were watching, and wow. … I was like, ‘I can’t believe no one is talking about this.’”

So there was then a problem with matching or explaining different accents.

The movie, for its part, does not make it clear whether Gomez’s character is a native Spanish speaker or an English speaker learning Spanish, and that ambiguity is not helped by the script, which, as many have pointed out, seems to have been written in French and translated into Spanish. As a result the dialogue includes unnatural idioms that neither a native Spanish speaker nor a person learning Spanish would use.

This kind of awkward word phrasing shouldn’t happen.

In contrast, Emilia Pérez does not express solidarity with Mexicans, nor does it reliably portray the ordeal of the families of the disappeared. It is an insensitive caricature that portrays a Mexico of narcos, violence, and soap operas. It is a fake Mexico that wins Academy Awards. The film paints a dangerous portrait, especially now that the Trump administration is back, with its redoubled bluster about Mexico, its promises to emphasize “security,” and its threat of sending U.S. troops south of the border.

While I enjoy Saldaña’s fierce performance, I don’t feel that this represents diversity in a good way. While accepting her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress Saldaña apologized, but maybe filmmakers in this age shouldn’t even be making  films that exploit the stereotypes and create fake insights into a culture of which the creator is largely ignorant.