Juan Del Monte feels like he could use a change. A big one.
Attorney Rita Mora Castro certainly understands that. Del Monte—known to his legion of well-paid friends as “Manitas”—is one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords. His wealth is fathomless, his power limitless. His infamy? Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? Everybody knows his name. But if he shows his face in the wrong places? He might find himself seated in a courtroom—or dead and dismembered in the desert.
Yes, Manitas wants—needs—a change, the sort of change that requires someone to meet the right people, grease the right palms, distribute the right palms. And so, he bribed and brought Rita to him: Bribed her with the promise of life-changing money, then brought her to his well-armed encampment with a bag over her head. You can’t be too careful. Not here, not with the change he seeks to make.
And what kind of help could someone like Rita provide? What kind of change could a man like this want? Rita wonders as she faces the notorious criminal—a man who could have her fed to his dogs with a snap of his fingers. Does he want a visa to a country far, far away? Perhaps a new identity: plastic surgery to hide the telltale scars and golden grill in his mouth? A litany of new bank accounts to shuffle newly laundered money into?
Manitas won’t say. Not until Rita agrees to work for him. “Hearing is accepting,” he tells her.
“What do I risk?” Rita asks.
“Becoming rich,” Manitas says with a smile.
Rita takes the piece of paper offered to her and signs. She’s accepted. Now, it’s time to hear.
“I want to be a woman,” Manitas says.
Rita betrays little surprise other than a small pause, a widening of the eyes.
“To change your life or to change your sex?” She asks, finally.
“What’s the difference?” Manitas says.
If Rita has qualms, it doesn’t matter now. Hearing is accepting. If Manitas wants a sex change, he’ll have it. She’ll find a doctor who’ll keep the secret. She’ll find a place where he can heal, somehow plant evidence that convinces the world—including Manitas’ own cartel—that he’s well and truly dead. She’ll protect Manitas’ wife, Jessie, and two young sons—sending them to a country where they’ll be safe from Manitas’ countless enemies. Rita will make it happen; if she doesn’t, the drug lord will surely have her killed.
But if Rita imagines that a successful surgery will mark the end of her relationship with Manitas, she’ll have quite the surprise in store.
[Warning: Spoilers are contained in the following sections.]
As you might’ve guessed, Manitas eventually transitions into Emilia Pérez of the title. And that physical transition might be only the second-most surprising thing about the character’s second act.
As a notorious drug lord, Manitas was directly responsible for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disappearances and subsequent deaths. And the toll from cartel crime in total? We’re told the victims number in the “tens of thousands.” Emilia—now emotionally divorced from Manitas’ crime-sodden past—deals with some serious guilt. So Emilia channels energy and money into creating a very special organization—one that helps families find out what happened to their lost loved ones.
This is obviously a dangerous thing to do, as Rita reminds Emilia: The transitioned drug lord runs the risk of being recognized and exposed. But Emilia pursues the cause with almost single-minded zeal, and it does some real good. A musical number (yes, Emilia Pérez is a musical) introduces us not just to families who can now find closure, but to confessing informants who themselves may have been plagued with guilt as well. Pérez’s organization, they sing, allows them to “forgive and ask forgiveness.”
Emilia also proves to be a loving … parent? As Manitas, leaving his kids was the most painful part of the sexual transition. But after, Emilia decides that it’s not just hard: It’s impossible. Emilia is determined to bring her children back in her orbit again—inviting their mother (and Manitas’ ex-wife) to live with her. She pretends to be a loving aunt to the two boys, but Emilia proves to be a more conscientious caretaker at times than Jessi, their immature biological mother. And in a surprisingly tender scene, one of the boys lies next to Emilia and sings how Emilia smells “like Papa.”
Rita—the only other person who knows who Emilia was and is besides Emilia—proves to be not only a talented and dedicated lawyer, but a conscientious friend, too. Emilia’s organization provides Rita with far more purpose than Rita’s previous careers (as an underappreciated governmental attorney or a rich, still-practicing-law socialite). And when the need arises, she steps up to take care of Emilia’s children.
The doctor who ultimately performs the surgery appears to be at least nominally Jewish, and he warns Rita that Manitas will always be, on some level, Manitas. And he couches those cautions in song and with religious undertones.
“I only fix the body,” he says, “But I never fix a soul,” adding that “My door is not God’s door.” (Rita argues with him, saying that changing the body helps change society. And by changing society, you do change the soul.)
Someone crosses herself and says amen. We see a priest.
At the end of the film—and consider this another spoiler warning—Emilia dies. Soon, the surrounding community turns Emilia (not knowing who she used to be) into a sort of secular saint—complete with a statue of Emilia that is paraded through the streets and revered, it would seem, by thousands.
When Manitas tells Rita about his desire to become a woman, he tells the lawyer that he’s already begun the process by undergoing hormonal therapy for two years. (He opens his shirt to show Rita the progress, but the audience does not see what he reveals.) Sometime after the surgery, we see the newly transitioned character sit up in bed and put on a bra—the side of a breast being visible to the camera.
Rita’s in charge of tracking down a doctor or clinic that can perform Manitas’ surgery. When she goes to Bangkok, she participates in a musical number that unpacks the process pretty thoroughly and—at least in its lyrics—graphically. (The doctor asks if the masculinely dressed Rita is interested in the surgery for herself; she says, unequivocally, no.) Patients are whirled around on gurneys during the musical number, obviously before or after gender-altering surgery, and we see a flash of a bare rear.
It should be noted that Manitas’ desire for a change in gender is not actually about sexual relations. Emilia talks about Manitas’ passionate interactions with then-wife Jessi. And after transitioning, Emilia winds up in the arms of a woman. The two kiss after one spends the night in the other’s house, and Emilia sings about how nice it is to be desired and loved as a woman.
Jessi, we learn, had an affair with someone else when she was married to Manitas. She picks up the relationship once she’s back in Mexico (calling her former lover up with an obscene reference to her aching genitals), and she’s often out all night with her former and current paramour. It makes for an interesting dynamic, given that Jessi and her sons are living with Emilia—who, unbeknownst to her, is her former husband—and Emilia gently pries for information, trying to hide his jealousy. Emilia clearly wants to know whether Jessi was involved with the guy when Jessi and Manitas were married; Jessi doesn’t divulge, and instead tells Emilia (truthfully, it would seem) how much she loved Manitas—but how positive she was that he’d eventually kick her to the curb when the next pretty young thing came along.
Rita bemoans her own lack of a love life (she’s never involved with anyone during the movie’s timeline). Emilia jokes that, if Rita sees someone she’s interested in, Emilia would be happy to buy him for her.
Before agreeing to perform the surgery, Manitas’ soon-to-be doctors says that if his unnamed client is a “wolf,” a sex change won’t change that aspect of him. “If he’s a wolf, you’ll be his sheep,” he warns Rita.
Make no mistake, Manitas—as a drug lord—is an alpha wolf, ready to tear out the throat of anyone who crosses him. When Rita first agrees to meet him, the rendezvous takes the form of a kidnapping. And when Rita seems to be spending Manitas’ money too freely at first, Manitas’ henchmen break into her apartment and throw a clear plastic bag over her head, as if they mean to suffocate her. Via the phone, Manitas tells her that he will kill her unless she works faster and more frugally.
But no, the sex change operation does not entirely remove the wolf from the former Manitas. As Emilia, she attacks someone—mostly verbally, but she looms over the cowering victim. Emilia also hires apparently one of her old associates to beat up someone and tell him to get out of town—or else.
Early in the film, Rita’s tasked with defending a powerful businessman from charges that he killed his wife. Rita frames the woman’s death as a suicide (even though she’s well aware that her defendant is guilty), and we see some images of the woman’s bloodied body lying in the street.
Rita receives a package containing severed, bloodied fingers. A massive shootout leaves some combatants bloodied. People use knives to fight. We see two characters struggle in the front seat of a car, leading to a fiery crash. We hear cartel killers talk about who they killed and where the bodies were left—and the details get pretty gruesome. A woman smuggles a knife into a meeting.
More than 20 f-words and seven s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” b–tard,” “crap,” pr–k” and “p-ssy.” God’s name is misused thrice, once with “d–n.”
A big part of Manitas’ business was obviously wrapped up in the drug trade—though, admittedly, we see very little actual merchandise. (Rita tells us that his fortune was largely made through “synthetic” drugs.) But we do see the trappings of that lifestyle: covert meetings in the middle of the desert, a seemingly endless legion of armed henchmen, unimaginable wealth.
Jessi often goes out on the town, leaving her kids behind with Emilia and the household’s cadre of servants. We see Jessi drink heavily and dance, and she sometimes comes home rather tipsy.
Characters drink wine and whiskey. Someone is said to smell like cigars.
By agreeing to help Manitas facilitate his trade, Rita becomes wealthy herself through those ill-gotten gains. And when she begins to work for Emilia as well, Rita continues to benefit from the wealth that Manitas/Emilia “earned” through drugs and crime and murder. So when she’s at a posh fundraiser for Emilia’s charity—filled with some of Mexico’s wealthiest businessmen and corrupt politicians—there’s more than a whiff of hypocrisy as she sings and points fingers at their own misdeeds and corrupt ways. (And the movie doesn’t seem to acknowledge this double standard at all.)
There’s a whale of a custody dispute in play. People are kidnapped, while others plot criminal deeds.
Emilia Pérez is one of Netflix’s prime Oscar contenders. Featuring dynamite performances by Zoe Saldana and trans actor Karla Sofia Gascon (born Juan Carlos Cascon), the film will surely draw plenty of attention.
And, of course, it comes with plenty of problems, too. If you’ve read any section of the review up ‘til this point, you know about those.
But the thing that struck me about the film? How evangelical it felt.
Don’t misunderstand me: This is not, on any level, a Christian film. But it does, in a way, try to offer an alternative to faith-based transcendence—a way to fill (what Christians would call) that God-shaped hole in our hearts.
Think about Manitas’ story arc—one that carries echoes that of many a religious testimony. I had it all: Money, power, fame. But I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t enough. And then I found (fill in the blank), and it utterly transformed me.
In Christian circles, that “blank” would be filled by Jesus. But for centuries, secular society has tried to fill that blank with something else—everything from science to social revolution to, especially in the 21st-century, sex.
Manitas, instead of finding God, finds that he should’ve been a woman. “This is my only hope to live my own life,” he says. “The life nature refused to give me.”
But as is the case whenever we try to find something outside God to truly fill us, to make us feel whole, we find that it’s not quite enough. Manitas—now Emilia—tells Rita years after the change that she can’t live without her children, and she hires Rita to bring them to her. She dives into her nonprofit work, trying to somehow redeem a lifetime of sin by finding what happened to the victims of Mexico’s cartel violence—tracking down the bodies of those whom she, as Manitas, was often guilty of killing. Emilia finds another sort of fulfillment in the arms of another woman, telling us just how wonderful it is to be loved and desired for who she now is.
We see hints of the old Manitas underneath. A wolf will always be a wolf, his doctor once said, and the film suggests that, yes, there is an element of truth in that. But the film insists that changing the body does change the soul. That sex—in this case, a sex change—holds the key to meaning. To wiping away one’s sins. To salvation.
So transcendent is this transformation that Emilia Pérez is practically, and unapologetically, deified at the end: Manitas is dead. Long live Emilia.
So in this way, too, Emilia Pérez is an evangelical movie … evangelizing for our ability to recreate our sexuality in whatever way we see fit. To transform from one thing or another or something else entirely. As Rita says, “Ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between.”
And yet, we Christians know the truth: Real change begins from the inside out, not the outside in. “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart,” 1 Samuel 16:7 tells us. We may try to remake ourselves from the outside. But real change? Real salvation? That takes place in our innermost selves—deep and mysterious, a place that only our Creator can truly see. Changes to our face? Our bodies? Our organs? Mere window dressing on who we truly are: God’s creations, perfectly and wonderfully made.
Do any of us feel complete? Do any of us feel whole? Not in this world. And try as we might to fill that gap inside our souls with what the world has to offer, we find just one hope for that. And a surgeon—no matter how skilled, no matter how well-meaning—can’t hope to compete.
My door is not God’s door, the surgeon here says. And that is the truest line that Emilia Pérez has to offer.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
Our weekly newsletter will keep you in the loop on the biggest things happening in entertainment and technology. Sign up today, and we’ll send you a chapter from the new Plugged In book, Becoming a Screen-Savvy Family, that focuses on how to implement a “screentime reset” in your family!
