The one of the disappeared by the narco is one of the themes that vertebran the musical Emilia Pérez (2024), directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard and released in Spain on December 5. The film has reaped the applause of criticism and the public since its premiere in the last edition of the Cannes Festival (also the winner for Best Musical Film in the Gold Balloons) but has raised many ampoules in the Latin American country -seman before Its premiere- for the perspective it adopts about one of the greatest wounds in Mexico and the clichés with which, they assure, portrays their culture.
The film follows the surrender of Manitas del Monte, a bloodful narco who wishes to become a woman and leave his criminal life to embrace his most feminine and maternal side becoming Emilia Pérez (played by the Spanish Karla Sofía Gascón, who has become the First trans actress to win the best actress award in Cannes). To do this, a little -mounting lawyer who subsists based on defending local gangsters will be kidnapped in the street. The film will travel the new life of Manitas – now Emilia – as a great Samaritan in their own country, helping ‘search engines’ mothers through an association.
The ‘search engines’ are mothers who seek their children and the children of others. Its main tool, homemade, is a long steel rod like those used to reinforce the concrete in a work. At one end, they tie a vertical stick or other rod to make a cross -shaped handle. The other sharpens and nail the deep tip on the earth. Then they take it out and they smell it. If it smells rotten, it is that there is a body down there. The ‘search engines’ represent, for most, a symbol of resistance to the impunity and violence of organized crime in Mexico.
“They live in the boundary of the bureaucratic,” explains to this newspaper the film critic and cultural journalist Nicolás Ruiz, from his home in Mexico City. “They have to fight with local governments or feudal justice systems of particularly small and forgotten places in the country to do absolutely sordid love,” he continues to point out that everyone in their country has lost someone. “We all know people who disappeared,” he says. He had to go to recognize the body of a relative to a morgue and crossed with a 14 -year -old girl who was going to identify her father. “The officials treated her as if she were in a pollería while we walked through a water and blood browsing hall. It is something as usual, as common, that such horrible situations as that ends up bureaucratizing, ”he explains.
However, and despite the recognition of the figure of the ‘search engines’, Nicolás Ruiz describes the film as “frightful.” The Mexican critic ensures that the big problem of the Audiard film is not that it is a foreigner and looks from the outside of Mexican society but its perspective. “I saw the film at the Morelia Festival when Audiard himself came to present it and he said he had not stepped on Mexico during filming. I hallucinated and I think that’s where general criticism began to become strong, although from Cannes some colleagues had come angry, ”Ruiz continues.
The film, which opens commercially in Mexico on January 23, has been widely pirate by the network and has left a good handful of memes ironic with the themes it deals and the common places incurred by the radiography that the film makes of Mexican culture. “It is one of our defense mechanisms, humor,” says Karina Solórzano, a teacher in film studios and Mexican film researcher.
On the other hand, associations such as Glaad (Gay and Lesbian Alliance against defamation) have condemned the representation of the trans character in the film, qualifying it as a retrograde. And intellectuals, such as Mexican writer Jorge Volpi or philosopher Paul B. Preciado, have written in the press pointing out the first that the film presents a narrative that simplifies and stretches the violence of drug trafficking, making it an anecdotal background, while the second point that trans representations in the media are still trapped between exoticism and pathologization.
“The problem is that it has a very simple gender reading,” says Solórzano. “That is, when the character of Emilia Pérez is a man is very bad and when she is a woman then she becomes good?”, And he adds that “it changes from one thing to the other like who puts new pants, without investigating the psychological processes ”. The researcher points out that the issue of drug trafficking and Mexican drama “has not treated enough in the cinema.” “It is a pending and, of course, when a French filmmaker comes, it makes a large -scale production, and you find a cliché after others and receive many awards is normal for you not to like it,” he continues.
“At a certain point,” adds Nicolás Ruiz, “we are a country that has exported that exoticism with which the world of drug trafficking looks, but we do not allow anyone to speak of it anyway. It is a very complicated issue of being still Mexican, ”he explains.
More than one hundred thousand missing
Since the registration began in the 50s, some 115,000 people have disappeared in the Latin American country. And this are just the official figures. In addition, according to data provided to eldiario.es By Roberto González Villarreal, prominent Mexican academic and author of Forced disappearance in Mexico: from repression to profitability, 75% of the disappeared in the country are men except in the State of Mexico where the figure is equalized in 50-50. They, to work as slaves to exhaustion. They, prostituted. “Most of the missing men are currently young between 14 and 30 years and women between 10 and 19,” explains González Villarreal on the phone from Acapulco.
For Alonso Díaz de la Vega, film critic and author of Emilia Pérez or how the colonialist imaginary caricaturizes violence -A article widely read and published in the Journal Gatopardo- The biggest problem of the tape is the lightness with which the subject addresses. “I do not believe that the intention is to harm, much less, but when you admit that you have not investigated the environment too much and that you have hired the actresses for a commercial issue, there you are going to fail, and that is what has happened” , argues in conversation with this newspaper.
Díaz de la Vega wonders what the reaction would be like if a musical was made about the shootings of the Bataclán room in Paris. The cinematographic informant compares in figures the Mexican situation with the Balkan War in Europe and Ironiza in his article what would have happened if an American had directed a light musical on a ratko of Ratko Madlic who had killed people in Sreberenica because he could not express your gender identity; On how he fled, surgery was made and is now sanctified by his victims thanks to his efforts to clarify each dead. “It is not comparable, I know, they are very different contexts, but I think it gives us an idea of the level of violence in Mexico. It is a humanitarian crisis, ”he says.
A wound that does not stop bleeding
Every day someone disappears. All. González Villarreal assures it that clarifies that, in recent decades there has been a change in kidnappings. “From the 90s there is a real explosion in the disappearances,” he says to add that, for many years, they had to do with the world of narco, with the guerrillas, but now what is sought is labor is . “All this is linked to the criminal industry, it is not the narco alone, but companies that produce illegal goods of all kinds,” he explains to add that, sometimes, the actions of the people, the resistance, manage to return the disappeared to the disappeared to Your homes. Others, on the other hand, all effort is useless. “People, associations, often react because they often occur in the street, and streets are cut and strikes are made to press and that the kidnapped returns from a destination that is worse than slavery because, in these cases, you work even Death. Unless you get off, ”ditch.
Days before this article is written, Flora Sánchez Guillén, controller of the municipality of Atarjea in Guanajuato, is kidnapped in front of her daughter in the street. At the moment in which these lines are written a few hours ago that has been released. Unharmed Flora Sánchez Guillén is counted among those who, kidnapped, are lucky. Others, many, no.
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