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Rita, a lawyer, helps cartel leader Manitas transition to the woman he dreams of becoming.
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Overqualified and undervalued, Rita is a lawyer at a large firm that is more interested in getting criminals off the hook than bringing them to justice. One day, she is given an unexpected way out, when cartel leader Manitas hires her to help him withdraw from his business and realize a plan he has been secretly preparing for years: to become the woman he has always dreamt of being.
"Emilia Pérez is a film that has sparked controversy for various reasons. Among them: being a production set in Mexico but written and directed by the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, with actresses who speak Spanish but are not Mexican (Spanish actress Karla Sofia Gascón and Americans Zoë Saldaña and Selena Gomez, with particular criticism directed at the latter), and most importantly, superficially addressing issues such as the trans experience and the crisis of the disappeared in Mexico, both central to its plot. The film tells the story of a trans drug trafficker, initially known as "El Manitas" (Gascón), who kidnaps a lawyer (Saldaña) to help her with a singular purpose: to fake her death and transition to start anew. Years later, now as Emilia Pérez, she returns to Mexico to try to be near her children and ex (Gomez), while also becoming an activist for the disappeared victims of the drug cartel. The film has its positive aspects, such as the cinematography and Saldaña's performance, but it's important to note its shallow approach to the social context, which it instrumentalizes and trivializes to tell a redemption story that, in strictly dramatic , is not well developed. It is worth watching and reflecting on it, on European representation models of other countries' realities, and on how it perpetuates a binary exoticism both towards Latin America and the trans community."