Selena Gomez has pushed back after actor Eugenio Derbez branded her performance in Emilia Perez “indefensible”.
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The movie follows Karla Sofía Gascón as the titular character, a Mexican drug cartel leader who undergoes gender affirmation surgery to medically transition. Gomez plays her partner Jessi Del Monte in the film, which was released on Netflix to a divisive reception.
Mexican actor Derbez, 63, said on a podcast that he had watched the film with frustration. “Selena is indefensible,” he said. “I [watched the movie] with people, and every time she had a scene, we looked at each other to say to each other, ‘Wow, what is this?’”
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“I feel like they don’t speak Spanish,” he continued on the Hablando de Cine podcast. “If you watch a Russian film or a German film, that is subtitled to Spanish and you see someone [speaking in the original language], you say, ‘Oh, look. OK! Interesting.’”
He also hit out at director Jacques Audiard for making a film in Spanish without understanding the nuances of how the language could affect the performance. Gomez herself has limited experience with the language, but was required to act in Spanish.
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“How funny that a director… I liked the film, aside from the Selena [scenes] that jump at you, because it has salvageable things,” he continued.
“But I told myself, ‘How weird that the director doesn’t speak English or Spanish and the movie is in Spanish and English, and it takes place in Mexico and you don’t understand the culture.’ It’s like if I made a film in Russian without knowing the culture or speaking Russian and talk in French.”
After a clip of the interview went viral on social media, Only Murders in the Building star Gomez commented on the post to explain why she felt her Spanish wasn’t up to scratch.
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“I understand where you are coming from,” she said. “I’m sorry I did the best I could with the time I was given. Doesn’t take away from how much work and heart I put into this movie.”
In a two-star review of the film,The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey called it a “reductive take on the trans experience”.
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