Netflix’s Best New Movie Breaks Boundaries
by Caroline Reid · ForbesMovies don't get much more multi-cultural than the latest to hit Netflix. Set in Mexico, filmed in France with Spanish dialogue, it doesn't sound like a production which would get more coverage in English than any other language but indeed it has. There is good reason for this.
Called Emilia Pérez, it has a fittingly convoluted plot about a fearsome Mexican cartel leader who fakes their own death in order to give up the gangster life and start over as a woman. She enlists the help of a tireless defense attorney who has spent her career keeping cartel bosses out of jail but is given an opportunity to come good.
Her task is to relocate the cartel leader's family to the snowy climes of Switzerland giving the story an air of The Sound of Music. It's not a coincidence. As if Emilia Pérez didn't have enough going on, it is also a musical. That's not all.
Although the film has become famous for having a talented transgender lead in the form of Karla Sofía Gascón, it also stars Zoe Saldaña as the overworked attorney and one-time Disney TV princess Selena Gomez as the gangster's moll who heads offshore. Strange as it may seem, the A List talent isn't the reason why the movie has been getting traction in the English media.
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The Netflix-produced movie describes itself as “an audacious fever dream that defies genres and expectations” which sets itself a high standard. The streamer seems confident that it has a hit on its hands which is why the English-speaking media has taken note.
Ever since Bong Joon-ho’s Korean-language Parasite became the first foreign language film ever to win Best Picture in the 2020 Oscars, Hollywood has been on the lookout for another international film to break out. Our Forbes.com colleague Paul Tassi described it as a "surefire Oscar contender" and audiences seem to be taking to it too.
The movie currently has an 80% audience score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes with critics giving it 82% across 175 reviews which is quite an achievement given its language barrier and peculiar premise. The curiosity factor combined with the movie's title chances have led to it getting 36% more media coverage in English than its native Spanish.
The data comes from Factiva, a media search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages from 200 countries. Factiva's archive is constantly updated and contains more than two billion articles with the oldest dating back to 1944. It shows that over the year so far Emilia Pérez has been mentioned in 6,977 articles with 2,343 of them in English. The US was the biggest single English-language source market with 1,865 articles whilst a total of 4,385 came from Europe.
Coverage peaked last month when the movie was shown at BFI London Film Festival which was followed by a limited release in the UK. This generated 1,862 articles in October and was closely followed by 1,764 in September when the movie was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. The first spike of media attention came in May when the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival leading to it being mentioned in 1,390 articles. If it wins at the Academy Awards next year that will surely all pale into insignificance.