Another trans activist take over at the Barbican.
The blurby bit
About Karla Sofía Gascón (formerly Juan Carlos Gascón)
Like most of my tweeps, this trans-identified male came to my attention following his hysterical tizzy to Cannes when he won Best Actress, in typical AGP fashion, he took the full throttle approach in an appeal for pity. You might think from watching the clip, that he would be scenery chewing in Emilia Pérez, but in fact easily manages a nuanced performance.
Which is all too understandable as Gascón’s career has been a busy one, with credits stretching back to 1995. From 2016, just after the Trans Tipping point/Caitlyn Jenner, there is an extended lull until 2022, when credits convert to his new stage name Karla Sofía. Gascón began his ‘transition’ around the age of 45, and, according to the interview below, had vocal chord surgery. It is clear that he has had full facial feminisation surgery/a face full of fillers, as he is almost unrecognisable from the handsome man he once was. He is also holder of a certificate which states he is female.
Gascón posts photos of himself, his wife and daughter on Instagram. His daughter looks to be a teen and he claims she is delighted to have ‘two mothers’ – see below.
The room
The tickets for this event were almost sold out. Lots of Spanish speakers in the room. Make no mistake, trans is still the hottest thing in town. But to be fair, this film is also hot, because despite the rancid underlying political message, it’s still a film full of surprise, menace and musical numbers. Director Jacques Audiard, responsible for making Tahar Rahim a star with his excellent French language film The Prophet, may well have done the same for his man Gascón.
Watching Emilia Pérez a second time
I posted a rather hasty review (which contains full spoilers) of Emilia Pérez after I watched it on Netflix. I still stand by that review and my assertion that it is essentially a gothic romance. On reflection though, I can see it plays out very differently with an unlikeminded audience. They laughed at the jokes, for a start. I still think it’s a brilliant film though and it gave me spine tingles several times, mainly due to the atmospheric cinematography. It’s well worth seeing on the big screen.
I had also wondered if Audiard was being satirical in plain sight about the whole trans issue – a murderous drug lord becomes a lubbly wubbly trans lady after all, and it reveals so many truths inadvertently, that male aggression remains, wives are gaslit, children abandoned. However, after the second viewing and hearing the director talk, it confirmed that the film is very much sympathetic and irony-free in this respect.
I am also making a prediction now: The major and lasting criticism this film will receive from mainstream critics won’t be over how the female characters are sidelined and used by Manitas/Emilia (probably won’t even get mentioned). No, it will be the dubious rehabilitation of Drug Lord as Saviour. Several online sources report that the yearly homicide figures in Mexico exceed 30,000 (that’s roughly 29 people out of every 100,000) so this aspect is plainly ridiculous and unlikely to be ignored, even by woke bros.
The host, Rebecca Root
Star of the awful BBC trans-tipping-point 2015 sitcom, Boy Meets Girl, was the chosen interviewer for the talk with director Jacques Audiard, and lead actors Karla Sofía Gascón and Zoe Saldaña. A film critic is normally chosen for such gigs but I suspect the Barbican’s ‘inclusion policy’ meant that only a trans activist would be suitable.
Rebecca Root is a trans-identified male actor and activist, whose recent credits include a voice on the Hogwarts Legacy video game (hah!) and Heartstopper, a drama written by a woman who identifies as asexual. Root sensibly decided to dress down for the event, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a trans activist slogan and jeans, ensuring no unfavourable comparisons to his glamorous compatriot.
The interview
Jacques Audiard’s inspiration
Audiard had been reading a novel in which a character, who was a drug dealer, wanted to transition but the author failed to follow up the character’s journey, so Audiard decided to riff on that. The first treatment he wrote was in the form of a libretto. He thinks of it as a musical drama.
Five minutes in and Root has a powerful moment
That’s right, despite the dozens of questions Root could have asked about the song and dance numbers, the cinematography, the structure of the movie, etc, it was time to address the elephant in the room. (And by elephant, I mean the one dressed to the nines, way too much leg exposed.) Part of the moment was captured by another audience member. Root bemoaned how difficult it was to be a ‘trans woman’ in the business (Audiard reflexively petted Root) and offered his solidarity to Gascón. Gascón clearly did not appreciate being addressed by Root as ‘sister’ and remained icy towards him throughout, leaving Root to squirm.
After brown-nosing failed, Root asked about where his career was before the role was offered to him (in other words, Root had looked at Gascón’s IMDb entry too and had seen the obvious). Indignant, Gascón responded that he had been acting since he was 16 years old and was now 52. He had spent his whole life acting and loved the profession, it was the genie in the lamp who had connected him to Jacques Audiard.
Root wasn’t going to give up easily though, pointing out that Gascón was in his fifties now (men are so bitchy, aren’t they?), and sometimes people had to wait a long time for their dreams to come true. Root spoke from the same experience. Via a translator, Gascón responded that his whole life he had been told by people that he would not be able to transition. He’d been told this repeatedly. However, every negative comment was just fuel to his fire. The external hate had become a driving force, helping his progression. In fact, the more he became ‘public enemy no. 1 of all these hateful people,’ the more he could achieve. Obviously in a thirty year career, there are successes and failures – Gascón tailed off there, averse to further introspection.
Root, with the confession he’d wanted all along, evinced faux sympathy for Gascón’s alleged predicament. ‘There are a tiny bit of people out there and they are not worth the dirt under our feet,’ said Root, awkwardly wiping his shoe on the floor. In former times, the audience might have emitted a few cheers or at least furious head nodding in response, but they remained unmoved. Or perhaps Root was particularly unlikeable.
Zoe Saldaña’s response
It is Saldaña’s performance really which carries the movie. It is she who sings the songs and does the dance numbers. (Gascón warbles every now and then, quite nicely it has to be said, but he doesn’t get a full song and dance.) However, if Saldaña was at all peeved at being upstaged, she showed no signs of it, rather the opposite. Working with Gascón was like ‘working with a force of fucking nature.’ Sometimes she felt like she needed to dodge his energy but there were others where she wanted to ‘climb and cuddle between her arms and kind of just go “teacher, teach me”.’ Saldaña also spoke of needing to ‘clear her runway, so that the jet of her could take off every day.’ It all sounds a bit weird, doesn’t it? Until you remember that we are dealing with luvvies and this kind of hyperbole is par for the course.
Back to the trans actor
Root wanted to know if Gascón was scared to play the role of Manitas, because, you know, these kind of issues can be very sensitive. No, said Gascón, he was an actress and wasn’t going to gift half of his performance away to anyone. Pausing, he then made a direct comparison to the historical practice of white actors blacking up and how this took away roles for black actors. Unfortunately the practice 70 years later was still the same. They were still casting actors and painting them green, painting them blue, putting a wig on them and asking them to play trans people (?). Acting professionals have the skills to play any role they want to do and Gascón didn’t want to take any opportunities away from people but it was important to give roles to people with the closest life experience. This was why it was important for him to play both Manitas and Emilia in the film. And actually it angered Gascón when people (take note, Root) asked him how it felt to ‘go back’ – this was a character, it was not his personal life story. (Dummy.) If he were to play a vampire, no one would ask him how it would feel to go back to playing a vampire.
More offence and waffle from Root
Root had points that he wanted to make though – about himself – sharing needlessly that he was a vocal trainer, before he got to the next question to offend Gascón. We could all see it coming a mile off. ‘I was drawn to your vocal speech for Manitas,’ Root implored, who had written a thesis* on the same. Root claimed that the categories of male and female voices were made up and hopefully becoming ‘more outdated now’. Basically Root wanted to know how Gascón approached the vocal work for the role of Manitas.
*Post event I looked it up: Essay There and Back Again? Or, Adventures in Genderland: an investigation into the nature of transsexual voice, its presentation in performance, and the perception of gender. Snappy title.
Gascón, whose voice register appears not to have changed much (see here for a 10 year old interview) despite interventions, emphasised that it took ‘incredibly intensive work’ and it was a major challenge for the role to get Manitas’s voice right. It took a long time to find the voice. But then admitted he had basically emulated Marlon Brando and Sylvester Stallone. He hadn’t thought about it being a male or female voice particularly, he was matching the voice to the character. Emilia’s character wanted to be as feminine as she could possibly be, so that is what he focused on for that character’s voice. Gascón went straight into a lower register, quoting a line from Manitas’s dialogue in the film. Lots of effort required, indeed.
How do we define Emilia Pérez?
Saldaña plumped for ‘necessary’. It was an important story being told in a time of ‘regression’ (presumably a reference to Trump, though she didn’t spell it out) and the film put us on the right side of history. Gascón, answering in English, told us if you saw the film dubbed in German it is a horror movie. And Audiard felt like he couldn’t top Gascón’s xenophobic comment.
All hilarious comments when you think about the regressive nature of how Manitas/Emilia treats the women in his life and that it explicitly excuses the violent crimes of a drug lord, the principal victims of whom are usually the poverty-stricken. All these things already make it a post modern horror show. Right side of history, my arse.
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