Cannes 2024 – Gender and transitioning
“Nowadays, for politicians, geopolitical matters come first, alongside energetic policies, war, oil sales, and then far behind, at the very end, the environmental crisis and gender issues, like notes at the bottom of a page. But perhaps if we start working on these issues around patriarcal violence and gender, on the contrary, we can deconstruct everything else” – The philosopher Paul B. Preciado is speaking, in an interview given to Les Inrocks last winter.
“In order to change society, we must change the bodies within it. And if you change bodies, you change society.” Thus explains, in her very militant way – and while singing, no less – the lawyer Rita, as she talks to a surgeon from a Tel Aviv who is a specialist of sexual reassignment surgery. Rita tries to convince this surgeon to supervise the transition of her client, an important Mexican drug lord who chose to transition and become Emilia Perez, the eponymous heroin of Jacques Audiard’s newest feature film.
Changing society after changing bodies, this is what Emilia manages to do: after spending her existence slaughtering lives, she dedicates her life as a woman to fixing them. The film is marked by the idea that it is through the deconstruction of every value associated to the concept of masculinity that moral progress can be accomplished. One does not expect, after discovering A Prophet, that it would one day be possible to hear Paul B. Preciado, a specialist of the transgender question, comment on a Jacques Audiard film.
The spectacle of toxic masculinity has for a long time been one of the major motifs in Jacques Audiard’s work (as soon as See How They Fall, in 1994). But his filmmaking has until now managed to leave space for other genders than the male one – even if his previous film, Paris, 13th District, co-written by Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius, already did open his filmmaking to a multiplicity of female characters and LGBT+ love stories).
Emilia Pérez thus sets up a dual conflit: that of the two gendered personas of its character – the past of Emilia as a male and her emotional bonds, forbid her entirely to change her life as she would like to ; that of two genders of filmmaking, both symbolizing Audiard’s metamorphosis: thriller and musical – in the same way that the film is weighed down by Emilia’s past as a man, the thriller genre, Audiard’s favorite, is first shed, before coming back in the end. Because Emilia Perez is a true musical, about which one could swear that the scene in which Zoe Saldana dances surrounded with apron-wearing cleaning ladies, is a quote from Golden Eighties (Akerman, 1986). One did not expect either, while discovering Dheepan, that we would one day think of Chantal Akerman while watching a film by Jacques Audiard. This reassignment of Audiard’s filmmaking is, in any way, a true success.
Traduction Emma Frigo