No one can be indifferent to Emilia Perez. Too raw are the realities it conjures together: narco-culture, transgender identity, brutal violence, male domination, and Mexicaness. None of it is made any easier by the fact that the film was not shot in Mexico but in Europe; that its director, Jacques Audiard, and lead actress are European; and that the supporting roles are played by U.S. Latina actresses. Where can Mexico be found in all this Mexican drama?

The journey of Emilia Perez across screens, media outlets, and the most dazzling festivals of the developed world, along with the scandals surrounding the film, has not surprised me. Instead, it has led me to retrace the labyrinth of meanings that makes some viewers ecstatic and pushes others, myself included, down the rocky road of indignation. First, I will address the rather epithelial triggers of my indignation; then, the ecstasy, which seems far more elusive.

Why, if I am not surprised, am I outraged that a film like Emilia Perez, which is undeniably well-crafted, competes for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, sweeps the César Awards, and shatters Oscar nomination records? Perhaps because of the endemic overlookedness of Latin American cinema in these spaces—spaces that dictate global consumption and hold the final word on which films will make it into the History of Cinema and which will be doomed to oblivion. The applause for Emilia Perez makes me think, with a certain sadness, of the recent films that did not receive it: Yana-Wara (2023), The Dog Thief (2024), Sugar Island (2024), Blue Heart (2021), and so many others that open up unique dimensions of Latin American sensibility, works that could—if the gatekeepers of cinema were others—perhaps lead global audiences toward different ways of experiencing film.

Latin American filmmakers like Ospina, Mayolo, García Espinosa, and Coyula have written extensively about the power of the First World gaze, and others will continue to do so. But perhaps it is easy to turn a deaf ear, given that, for those who truly-truly matter, Spanish is “the language of poor people and migrants,” to use the words of the director of Emilia Perez himself. There are no surprises here, just as there are none in the lead actress’s remarks about the religious and linguistic practices of migrants in Spain, or in her subsequent Hollywood blacklisting—despite the already fragile visibility of transgender individuals. Nor is it surprising that Jacques Audiard felt he did not need to study Mexico too deeply for the film, that he already knew what he needed to know.

Trapped in the emotional rollercoaster that Emilia Perez’s narco-melodrama offers—both inside and outside its diegesis—I have not stopped wondering if all of this is, in the end, a joke, an exquisitely crafted parody. The solemnity with which the cinema world’s gatekeepers have embraced the film makes me think of it as a postmodern specimen of those giant snails drawn in medieval manuscripts—snails that engage knights in lopsided duels. The presence of these warrior snails—depicted with intriguing accuracy beyond their scale—reveals how certain universes take on a life of their own, detached from empirical experience, an order of things Foucault called episteme. Perhaps ludicrous today, these imaginary snails once carried enough terror to pierce the armor of knights.

With this in mind, I cannot help but think that somewhere in the imagination that dictates what it means to be Other in today’s world, all these diverse beings—gendered, racialized, ethnic, linguistic, marginalized subjects—sing and dance to the same tune, altogether, embroiled like the many spectral/spectacularized figures Emilia Perez summons. There is a fascination among “global” audiences—one that is at once fear and pleasure—with Latin American barbarism, misery, violence, and superstition, just as there is with the almost saintly vulnerability of its people, the exoticism of its music and culture. There has also long been a tendency to portray gender nonconformity as dangerous, criminal, yet at the same time sublime, tragic, and mysterious. Many of the Latin American films that today manage to achieve international consecration check some of these boxes; Emilia Perez checks them all.