Just before attending a screening of Emilia Perez at this year’s London Film Festival, I’d become engrossed in Sonny Boy, the brilliant autobiography of Al Pacino. In the late sixties, as Pacino’s acting talent was gaining traction, he looked closely at the work of Dustin Hoffman with a keen, jealous eye. Hoffman, he says, was doing something on screen he’d never seen before. Quite the compliment.
As I was reading this passage, a thought crossed my mind. How brilliant would it be to witness something genuinely new in a film in 2024? Two days later, I sat aghast among a packed South Bank cinema as Karla Sofia Gascon – a Spanish, transgender telenovela actress and brand-new name to me – presented the most startling portrait of lives we have become accustomed to seeing tokenised, pitied, weaponised, ridiculed, reduced or routinely misunderstood. She turns Emilia Perez into this year’s unassailable screen warrior and heroine, a Scarface for the 21st century.
