Psycho. #31

"Issues"-led films? In this economy?

I recently chuckled when the Pink Smoke Podcast in their TIFF review said that Emilia Perez is 3-10 years behind its time. It got me thinking whether the function of films in the globalized internet age to raise important social issues is still relevant, or whether the 'emancipatory' film so to speak is obsolete and is merely a sign of virtue signalling right now.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to write about Emilia Pérez, which, when you sent this question in, I had still not got round to watching. That is, it wasn’t that I hadn’t got round to it so much as that I was dreading watching it, with every fibre of my being, and was desperately warding off that fateful moment. I have now seen Emilia Pérez. Oh how I wish I hadn’t!

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If I’ve understood your question correctly, you are asking me whether there is still a place in the world for “issues”-led films — that is, films with progressive leanings that seek to raise awareness of some topic or other — in an era when the internet is already doing that job for us. I like it as a question, although I would immediately query whether Emilia Pérez is that sort of film. There can be no doubt that, per your question, this film is woefully behind the times; that 3-10 year estimate feels, if anything, a little generous. The Eddie Redmayne-starring film The Danish Girl admittedly featured a cis man in the role of a trans woman, unlike Emilia Pérez — but that was released in 2015, which is coming up for 10 years ago; and even at the time, there were quite a few rumblings of discontent about its gender politics. Lukas Dhont’s assured but wrongheaded Girl received the Golden Camera and the Queer Palm at Cannes in 2018, but already at that time its perspective on trans issues — which shares some similarities with Emilia Pérez — was dated, and the film duly got battered on release. Girl’s emphasis on bodily change, particularly its seeming obsession with the penis, finds an echo in Emilia Pérez’s now infamous “from penis to vaginaaaaa” song. These things seem to me — a cis queer man — to be fairly stigmatising.