Palme d'Or? Or Palme d'Ordure?

Bulletins from a French butcher's shop

Photo: The stars of Emilia Pérez at Cannes (L-R): Selena Gomez, Karla Sofia Gascon, Adriana Paz, Zoe Saldaña

Here’s a sentence I’ve never written before: my wife received a penis through our letterbox this week.

Don’t worry, our village hasn’t acquired a postal pervert poking his particulars into private places. The penis in question was properly packed in a pervert-proof parcel.

I should hasten to add that the penis in question was also plastic. It was a 3D surgical model that my wife intends to use in her practice as a psychotherapist specialising in couples with sexual problems. Explaining the mechanics of erectile disfunction is apparently easier if you’ve got a penis in hand.

Why am I telling you this? Because we’ve just watched the first film I can remember in which the plot revolved around the presence, then absence, of a penis. I refer of course to Emilia Pérez, the Cannes prize-winning drama from the French director Jacques Audiard that has just picked up 13 Oscar nominations, a record for a foreign language film (it’s mostly in Spanish).

I’ll be honest from the start. I never imagined that I could possibly want to watch a subtitled transgender-themed film about a ruthless Mexican drug cartel kingpin who “presents as a man and identifies as a woman”, as the New York Times reviewer delicately put it. It’s a musical to boot.

Setting aside my own cis-gendered (if that’s the right word) prejudices (don’t worry, I’ll get back to them) I’d read a bundle of reviews from a diverse range of critics, including movie professionals, transgender activists, liberals and fogeys alike. Cannes may have loved the movie, but that’s the French for you. A lot of the rest of the film-watching world gave it the Palme d’Ordure.

“It’s offensive on many levels”. “A complete disaster from start to finish”. “A crass and shallow look at transness”. “Offensively mashes together very serious political and human issues with a kind of bad soap opera plotting that has no idea what it’s trying to say”. “Its attempt at progressive ideals and shedding light on some very real issues fall abysmally flat”.

You get the picture.

Throw in, then, my own inclination to blame gender-related activism – at least in part - for returning Donald Trump to the White House; for transforming an otherwise sympathetic issue into loud, insistent and ultimately destructive cultural warfare; for failing to accept that “preferred” pronouns are preferences, not obligations; in short, there was no way on earth I was going to sit through a noisy foreign film about a transgender Mexican gangster.

Then along came those Oscar nominations. All 13 of them. Not to mention four Golden Globes, plus the Cannes double whammy of Jury Prize for the film and Best Actress shared by its four lead stars (photo top), among them Spanish transgender actress Karla Sofia Gascon, who delivers a mesmerising performance as Manitas/Emilia. Wow.

Now, we can probably all agree that in the modern age a major Hollywood nomination has as much to do with virtue signalling and studio promotion as artistic worth. Comparing arthouse jewels to multiplex blockbusters may be a fool’s errand, but the Oscar ceremonies in particular need viewers as much as the films they honour.

That’s why Emilia Pérez, a decidedly non-mainstream musical ostensibly about dispensing with penises, is up for Best Film against, among others, Wicked, a musical about good and bad witches; not to mention Dune: Part Two, presumably a documentary about deserts, or somesuch.

All that said, I still found myself wondering how there could possibly be such a disconnect between the ferociously negative reviews I’d read and the Hollywood establishment’s acclaim. Were Emilia’s Oscar noms intended as a defiant riposte to the demon Donald; two fingers up the Trumpian arse from a liberal California wilting under his hostile glare? Or was the film actually worth seeing?

So I said to my French wife, who is largely indifferent to the Hollywood musical tradition: “Should we give Emilia Pérez a try?” It was streaming on Prime Video (in Spanish with French subtitles). “We can always fast forward through the singing bits,” I added. “You might enjoy the bits about penises”.

Montage: Karla Sofia Gascon as Manitas/Emilia

That’s how we came to be sitting on our sofa on Sunday night, spellbound by Audiard’s audacity. We didn’t fast forward once. We both thought the film was fabulous. Plenty of flaws, of course – suspension of disbelief essential, but for the most part it was vivid, radical and powerful. And here’s the strangest thing of all; I didn’t feel it was remotely a “transgender” film.

Or rather, creating a transgender character turned out to be merely a plot device for a study in human behaviour. It was a film about trying to leave the past behind, about making decisions that come to haunt you, about the joy and liberation you feel when finding your true self – and about the people you hurt as a result. You don’t need to be transgender to recognise some of that joy and pain.

Sure, the film came to resemble, at least in parts, one of Mexico’s famously overwrought telenovelas. But that seemed to me part of Audiard’s intent: life is a soap opera, don’t you think? Whether you’re transgender or straight.

Afterwards I understood why many supporters of transgender rights were disappointed in the film. As Time magazine’s critic noticed: “Instead of pleading for trans acceptance (Audiard) treats it as a given”. There is zero discussion of the politics of transgender rights or the pros and cons of dispensing with your penis – just a song entitled “La Vaginoplastia” (you can probably guess the translation of that one).

“Hello, very nice to meet you, I’d like to know about sex-change operations,” sings Zoe Saldaña as the lawyer organising the transition. The doctor sings back: “Man to woman or woman to man?” They all frolic around an operating theatre, turning tense and divisive transgender debate into a merry knees-up.

It’s possible to argue that if the transgender movement had stuck to singing instead of shouting (metaphorically speaking), it and we might have been spared Trump, who was last heard of kicking transgender soldiers out of the US military, while Congress banned its only transgender congresswoman from using the female toilets. But let’s just say that Emilia Pérez is a movie about humans not genders.

Will Emilia sweep all before her on Oscar night? I really can’t decide. I’ve only seen one other contender – Wicked, at my daughters’ insistence, and they would disown me if I failed to tell you that Wicked is the greatest film ever made* – but there seems lots of love out there for The Brutalist (Hungarian Holocaust survivor becomes an architect in America) and Anora (exotic dancer from New Jersey meets son of Russian oligarch). I hope to see both those films.

But Oscars aren’t really the point here. My question is: whatever you feel about the transgender issue, is Emilia Pérez a movie worth seeing? I think my answer is clear.

PS: *Wicked is not the greatest film ever made**

PPS: **This is a test to see if my daughters read to the end of my piece.