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.
Emilia Perez is the story of a Mexican cocaine baron, Manitas Del Monte, who transitions, becoming Emilia, disappears, then returns to her family four years later under the fictional guise of a lost aunt. Emilia proceeds to undergo several damascene moral earthquakes, connected to the work of her shady past and nervous present. To add a further layer of hysterics to the film’s wild tone, Emilia’s predicaments are told as a musical. The movie is quite mad. I adored every second of it.
Against director Jacques Audiard’s advice, Emilia Perez is played both before and after gender reassignment by Gascon. Her performance is astonishing: physical, elemental, funny, electrifying. While fundamental to the story, her gender identity is completely superfluous to its exhilarating impact. After picking up a collective trophy for Best Actress at Cannes with her three ensemble stars, Selena Gomez (Perez’s former wife, Jessica), Zoe Saldana (her sketchy lawyer) and Adriana Paz (her post transition girlfriend), there is now serious Oscars noise accumulating around the film.
If my own experience of Emilia Perez is anything to go by, Karla Sofia Gascon will be 2025’s perfect Best Actress nominee at next year’s Academy Awards. Her reading of Emilia is beyond crowd-pleasing. The audience at the South Bank broke into spontaneous applause as the credits appeared. There were whoops, hollers, cheers, mirroring the reception of Emilia Perez’s Cannes debut, where an 11-minute ovation greeted the picture. When Madonna saw it, she apparently broke down in floods of tears.
Both film and title character play into an interesting new form of screen storytelling that you might call ‘post-woke’, entirely disconnected from circular culture war bickering. There are traces of post-woke in the two hit sitcoms of the moment, English Teacher (which I loved) and Nobody Wants This (which I really didn’t). The beloved BBC/HBO hedge fund drama, Industry, is built on it. Emilia Perez is just its most dazzling example yet.
In English Teacher, an adorable broken gay schoolmaster in Texas is instructed on how passé his identity is by pupils and staff alike, but mostly by himself. Its defining post-woke moment arrives early, when he brings a thieving drag queen into school, to help with a sixth form project. Rather than instruct students on how to love themselves with rainbow flag sentimentality, he robs the school blind. The central chip on our protagonist’s shoulder is not reconciling himself to being gay but to the thankless task of teaching itself, in a warped system the kids have learned to play.
In Nobody Wants This, a pair of loveless Gentile sisters with a buzzy podcast upset an upscale LA Jewish community when one falls for their passive young rabbi. Both these shows delve into culture war hotspots, before unceremoniously dumping the pleasantries around them in favour of having an actual point of view. They acknowledge that representation cannot just be about showing up. They feel very 2020s.
To make post-woke art and entertainment is to prioritise the work’s clever observations on humanity over audience’s self-schooled, heightened sensitivities, while recalling that they might exist. Post-woke is pointedly on neither side of any spurious fake debates presided over by Elon Musk’s socials, while accepting that, you know, those things happened, and lessons should’ve been learned.
There’s something grown up about this new storytelling dynamic, facing down pettiness and point-scoring in favour of cutting to the nub of real, recognisable and imperfect human instincts. It chips away at the artificial sales pitch of the second lives we’ve learnt to present online. What results in the case of the fabulous Emilia Perez is both hyperreal and soaked in truth. A kaleidoscopic riot of story, character, song and dance.
If Karla Sofia Gascon is Oscar Nominated by the end of the year, she will become the most representative new signal of a culture shift. Amid the film’s freewheeling, winningly choreographed mania, I recognised and understood something new that Audiard and his incredible cast have made, the tightrope they’re treading between actual opera and soap opera. These could not be more unfashionable genres. Yet the director skilfully manages to bend both into shape, crafting something fit for modern purpose, a piece of genuinely striking filmmaking. What are awards ceremonies for, then, if not to reward artistic excellence, with a small side-line of the progress of history? Just give Emilia Perez all the Oscars now.
