EOY #2: Emilia Pérez, Memoir of a Snail, A Different Man
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024), Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliott, 2024), A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024)
Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard, 2024):
Emilia Pérez is one of the more puzzling films to be considered an awards season frontrunner in quite some time, not necessarily because of the content, bad as it may be, but because it fails to clear even a baseline of competency. This is a film as politically regressive as it is formally inept. As I noted on letterboxd right after seeing the film: pick a struggle. The film concerns a lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), who is hired by a trans cartel leader (Karla Sofia Gascon) to fake her death and smuggle her out of the country for gender affirming surgery. Years later, the cartel leader, Emilia Pérez, returns to Mexico, reunites with her ex-wife (Selena Gomez) and children as a long, lost relative, and founds an NGO dedicated to finding the remains of disappeared people. Oh, and it’s a musical.
Audiard is unproductively and distastefully obsessed with the metaphorical aspects of transition, building Emilia Pérez on reductive dualities such as man vs woman, disappearance vs reappearance, pre vs post surgery, cartel vs NGO, crime drama vs musical. Trans critics have written more eloquently than I could about the film’s politics (I like Juan Barquin’s in Little White Lies), so instead of harping on the film’s gender and bio-essentialism, or its vision of Mexico as a country defined by drugs and violence, I recommend you seek out some criticism from more qualified writers.
What I will say is that the actual filmmaking and screenwriting is terrible. The film’s formal construction undercuts its performances at every turn. Emilia Pérez so poorly lit that the actors’ faces are obscured for a significant portion of the film, and Audiard, ever the showman, can’t help but zoom and swerve his camera during the musical sequences, consistently distracting from the work of his cast. That the film is shapeless and manipulative in its drastic narrative turns, ending with an explosion that leaves every single thread lazily unresolved, isn’t necessarily fatal, but Audiard keeps the film pitched at the level of something like Narcos, a death-knell for a script that’s so obviously unserious. I can’t decide if I think Audiard actually believes he’s telling an important story about trans lives or Mexico. It’s baffling.
Emilia Pérez is available on Netflix.
Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliott, 2024):
In Memoir of a Snail, a young girl who loves snails, Grace, narrates her life story, one that’s marked by sadness, whom she describes as one of her family members. I find the brand of twee miserablism Elliott shamelessly indulges in so obnoxious. Speed-running through every tragedy a human could possibly endure, Grace is comically unlucky. She and her twin are faced with death, injury, bullying, neglect, homophobia, you name it. What’s especially annoying is the artificial way Elliott tries to punctuate these tragedies with moments of sweetness, or vice versa. Grace’s twin Gilbert loves playing with fire, a rather foreboding career goal that leads to the pair consistently injuring each other. But of course! Their scars form smiley faces. An even more grating example: A rushed description of a happy memory, of Grace, Gilbert, and their father having a cozy night in, reading books that turns sour when their father dies in his sleep. It’s not just the events themselves, it’s the delivery, which leaves no room for any emotions to breathe (“A day so precious… but fleeting”).
The main reason I decided to stick with Memoir is because it’s actually a rather beautiful animated film. Elliott’s gloomy claymation is impressively grotesque, and this is a film in that rare (at least in the West) genre of “adult animation”. I’ve certainly never seen as many claymation genitals or many other animated films with orgy montages. The maturity of the film is actually a rather interesting tension in the film, because its narration is simplistic to the point of derision, and narrated incredibly slowly, yet the subject matter is unmistakably adult. Even the relationship with the titular metaphor is weird in how direct it is, even by contemporary standards (in case you missed all of the times Grace says she’s dressed as a snail, Elliott even encases her in a shell at one point). I got the sense that Memoir is a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be. Can’t say I enjoyed it all that much, but the animation itself looks first-rate.
Memoir of a Snail is distributed by IFC and is in theaters now.
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024):
Many have understandably been comparing A Different Man to The Substance, another film about body modification and beauty standards, but where Fargeat’s satire is a frontal assault, Schimberg’s is embodies clenched resentment. Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling actor with neurofibromitosis, a condition that results in tumor growth across his face. Primarily starring in patronizing workplace videos that reduce him to his condition, Edward is a passive figure, isolated in his dilapidated apartment (complete with a hole straight out of Tsai Ming-Liang!). Edward yearns for romance, so when a new neighbor, Ingrid, (played by Renate Reinsve of Worst Person in the World fame) seems to take interest in him, her rejection drives him towards an experimental procedure that peels the tumors off of his face, revealing Sebastian Stan underneath. Faking his death, Edward tries to forge a new life for himself, a plan derailed not only by his own dissatisfaction, but also the discovery that Ingrid has written an off-Broadway play about his former life. As he auditions for the role, he’s confronted with Adam Pearson’s Oswald. Pearson has neurofibromitosis in real life, and his character’s charismatic self-possession, triggers all of Edward’s insecurities.
If A Different Man is one of our sharpest, most effective recent films about our troubled relationship with identity, it’s because it largely exists in this nether region between Edward’s two lives. Schimberg’s film refuses to make any concrete statements about identity, willing to simply exist in a tortured cause/effect loop. Attempting to play himself when he was still perceived as different, Edward is forced to grapple with how much his passivity, and his relative lack of substance, is actually attributable to his condition. Of course the presence of Oswald, who is everything Edward wants to be, confronts Edward with the reality that perhaps he had been using his condition as an excuse to avoid working on himself. Conversely, Edward’s facial transformation indeed grants him a high paying real-estate job, and as he interacts with Ingrid and numerous others, many of the cruel ideas that form the foundation of Edward’s self-hatred are actually confirmed. Pearson then, who becomes rich, takes his part in the play, and marries Ingrid, represents a liberation that Edward simply can’t achieve, his humanity sanded down by decades of societally and self-inflicted wounds. The film, shot in beautiful 16mm by Wyatt Garfield, moves at a breakneck pace from one bitterly ironic gag to the next. It’s cruel, it’s unfair, it’s funny, yet somehow never judgmental. A Different Man is worth seeing for Pearson’s performance alone. In fact, part of the film’s origin is Schimberg’s desire to write a role for Pearson that more closely reflects his demeanor in real life. Pearson is magnetic, and one can only hope that whether it’s with Schimberg or other directors, we’ll be able to see him in more roles like this in the future.
A Different Man is distributed by A24 and is available on VOD.