French People, Never Stop Being Perverts

I Watched Emilia Perez

I love the French. I know that's not the popular thing to say, but I don't care. I'm going to take it a step further and proclaim French food to be better than Italian food. It's just a fact. Saucisson, olives, foie gras, beef bourguignon, L'Entrecôte!!!!! I don't care if the French language is cringe, the south of France is an incredible place. The food, the wine, the constant smoke breaks, treating each meal like sex— the French have cracked the code on how to properly live and enjoy life. All the best French people are perverts. They turn perversion into an art form.

Two movies made by French people are up for the Best Picture Oscar this year: The Substance by Coralie Fargeat and Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard. Enough has been said about why Emilia Perez is a terrible film, so I won't beat a dead horse. My gripe with the movie isn't that it's a movie about Mexico with almost no Mexican actors and wasn't filmed in Mexico or that the lead actress is as racist and insane as half the people who leave comments on my posts. No, my gripe with the movie is it wasn't perverted enough. The Substance may be a feminist social satire, but that doesn't mean it isn't perverted; it is, and it's all the better for it. I don't think a movie has ever had more gratuitous ass and crotch close-ups. It ruled. Emilia Perez desperately needed some perv juice to spice it up.

The first time we meet the protagonist (Manitas), he hasn't yet undergone the sex change operation. The actress (from Spain) is both in maleface and brownface, looking like one of the aliens from Men in Black in a human disguise. The lawyer he has just kidnapped isn't convinced he wants to have a sex change operation, so Manitas flashes his big ol' titties at the lawyer to show the change is already in progress. However, we don't get to see the titties. This is the one moment the film actually piqued my interest. I wanted to see that hairy ugly dude's titties. A true perverted director would have shown them, you know, your Paul Verhoevens or Sion Sonos or John Waters. Imagine how much more based this movie would have been had John Waters made it. I know he’s not French, but he’s from Baltimore, and I defy you to name a more degenerate city than Baltimore.

The problem is Emilia Perez is inherently silly. A murderous drug kingpin thinks all will be forgiven just because he gets a sex change. Being a woman undoes all the pain and loss. Behind polyglots on YouTube, the Mexican cartels are some of the most twisted people on Earth. The movie never bothers to ask any of the big moral questions anyone with a brain watching would be asking.

Beyond all that, the most baffling part about this movie is that in the first half, every time we are at Manitas' "lair," it's literally just a fucking dirt pit. That's not hyperbole to say his house is shitty; I mean, it's a literal hole in the desert. And there are usually jeeps or ATVs driving around, like it's fucking Mad Max. What the fuck is this? Why would a rich beyond-belief drug cartel kingpin spend his time (with his wife and kids, no less) in a fucking dirt hole? Has the non-perverted French director seen how kingpins live? They live in luxurious fucking mansions. I should know, some of my best friends are Mexican cartel kingpins. That was by far the most bizarre part of the movie.

The film also tells us we're in Switzerland just by having an all-white void background. What cheap, lazy bastards.

The second half of the movie is Manitas, now Emilia Perez, doing a Mrs. Doubtfire routine with her children, but it isn't charming or whimsical.

Let's make movies perverted again, people. Remember when movies used to be made by cocaine-fueled brainstorming sessions? Our culture is on the verge of losing this.

Instead of watching this trite, watch true perverse masterpieces like Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, Sion Sono's Love Exposure, John Waters' Pink Flamingos, Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden, and Kevin Bacon.