“Emilia Pérez” is not good trans representation

Put this movie on tonight, going in blind, and was frankly horrified at how offensive it was. I don't understand why a transgender actress would ever agree to star in something like this..

The link is a collection of quotes from a lot of reviews but here are some snippets:

But I expect that a filmmaker so taken by the concept of transitioning, one who’s displayed a certain level of conscious sensitivity in his previous efforts to depict lives unlike his own, to at least display an informed understanding of what that concept actually looks like in practice

For Rita and Emilia’s transphobic Israeli surgeon, it’s fodder for a thought experiment. Despite agreeing to do the procedures, the surgeon suggests that instead of having plastic surgery, ‘he,’ meaning Emilia, ‘better change his mind,’ adding that although the surgeon can change Emilia’s body, ‘you cannot change the soul.’ To this, Rita argues, ‘Changing the body changes the soul. Changing the soul changes society.’ There, I guess, is a Monkey’s Paw morsel of realism: two cis people debating the ethics of transness without any trans people present.

In their very first scene together, Rita literally gasps with disgust at Emilia (in boy-mode drag as Manitas) opening her shirt to ‘prove’ she’s serious about transitioning. Though the audience, blessedly, isn’t shown the small breasts she’s presumably grown with two years of hormones, the reaction shot alone being played like a body horror reveal is enough.

There's also this:

https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/11/14/emilia-perez-gender-affirming-surgery-song-la-vaginoplastia-lyrics/

Referring to director Jacques Audiard, one person wrote: “Once in a while, a French dude will make a movie about queer people that people at Cannes will call ‘a life-changing work’ or whatever. Then it’s released to general audiences and we all find out it’s some South Park s**t.”

On the plus side, in May, Gascón became the first trans woman to be named best actress at the Cannes Film Festival, and most critics praised her for carrying the film. However, Audiard’s work has also been dubbed “cis nonsense” and a “reductive take on the trans experience,” while here at PinkNews, we said the film “loses all nuance when it comes to trans identity”. The movie film contains several tired trans tropes, and viewers were seemingly driven towards believing Emilia was a man underneath her surgery.

Emilia is deadnamed and misgendered at numerous points, while she describes herself as “half he, half she”. Tropes, including trans women being violent, their lives being tragic and being abandoning by their families, make up the bulk of the film, too. In arguably the most troubling scene, Emilia reacts with violence towards Jessi, seemingly adopting a similar low-register voice to the one she used pre-surgery.

And then there is this review on letterboxd:

https://letterboxd.com/comrade_yui/film/emilia-perez/

so alienated from the experience of lived trans identity that it gets many basic facts wrong, stuff that any trans person could tell you about

liberal-centrists can seemingly only understand queerness as 'the exceptional' to their 'normality', so they make a hyperbolic spectacle out of us and then go on to say that it's good optics, that it's 'representation', when in fact it is abstraction and dehumanization

what emilia pérez offers is not meaning, but the sensation of supposedly meaningful things moving in rapid succession, and it hopes the resulting blur will pass by quick enough that we do not notice the superficiality of its style -- in other words, a perfect film for awards season.