Now, 'trans' can compete with 'cis'?

Emilia Pérez (2025)

Director: Jacques Audiard

mvtimes.com/es/2024/10/29/emilia-
perez-film-musical-genre-bender/

This musical offering would not have garnered as much airtime if it had not been for an openly transgender individual who won the Best Actress awards at both the Cannes and the Oscars. Interestingly, a female actor (a cis woman) insists on being referred to strictly as an 'actor', not an 'actress'. They are particularly keen on this, demanding to be addressed as 'actors'. I suppose this does not apply to transgender actors. A quick glance at Karla Sofía Gascón's Wikipedia page states her occupation as an actress. For a transgender person, being addressed as female represents the ultimate victory of her transition. 

It continues to be one of the most nominated films of the year and the most nominated non-English language film in the Academy's history.

When it comes to the basics, this is a gangster film with a twist. The twist is that one can never conceive of a mob film as a musical. What's more, it makes the feared mobster, Manitas, want to leave it all behind to transition into becoming a woman after abandoning his wife and two children. To facilitate this, he hires an aspiring and desperate lawyer, Rita, to arrange all the medical and legal matters for him to disappear. After months of painful gender reassignment surgery and cosmetic procedures in Thailand and Israel, Manitas becomes Emilia Pérez. His wife and children are relocated to Switzerland. Manitas' death is staged.

Four years later, Manitas, now Emilia, must long for her family. She meets the family and introduces herself as Manitas' distant cousin. With the assistance of Rita, the lawyer, they relocate to Mexico City and live as one large, happy family. Trouble arises when Manitas' widowed wife rekindles her romance with an old flame. Emilia also runs a non-profit organisation that seeks justice for individuals killed by gangsters in Mexico.

Interspersed and woven into the story are actors bursting into song, occasionally with quite catchy tunes.

 

It's amusing that we used to laugh at Indian films when actors broke into song and dance back in the day. A 1932 Hindi film, Indersabha, along with its Tamil counterpart, Indrasabha, featured 70 songs. Now, Hollywood musicals are receiving awards—garnering all the nominations for highlighting the LGBTQ agenda, which is currently in vogue, though not so much for their artistic merit.

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Normalising woke culture?

Kadhalikka Neramillai (No time to love,  காதலிக்க நேரமில்லை;  Tamil, 2025)

Director: Kiruthiga Udhayanidhi

https://www.moneycontrol.com/entertainment/kadhalikka-neramillai-ott-release-
when-and-where-to-watch-this-romantic-drama-starring-jayam-ravi-a
nd-nithiya-menon-article-12936421.html

It would have been just another Netflix recommendation that I would have ignored. Having such an unoriginal name, which had been used before, did not excite me. For the ignoramus, in 1964, the Tamil cinema was taken back by Sridhar's superhit. Its psychedelic, picturesque Eastman moment came to be defined as Tamil cinema's first rom-com. The hit song. 'Visvanathan, velai vendum!' became to be sung as the voice of defiance of the oppressed.

My interest was piqued when a YouTuber of a channel I follow went into a tirade trying to tear down Netflix and its moviemakers for thinking out of such a crass movie. Other Tamil movie reviewers were kind to the movie, praising it for its modern approach to storytelling and refreshing filmmaking. They probably did not want to offend the First Family of Tamil Nadu, as the ruling CM's family is involved in the film's direction, production and distribution. My YouTuber accused Netflix and the producers of trying to tear down every fibre of decency and threaten to destroy the Indian way of life. The prescribed Indian or Tamil way of living, where a female is supposed to follow specific rules regarding sex, weddings and patriarchal lead, is torn down.

The movie starts with a rebellious daughter, Shriya, working as an architect in Chennai, asking her mother how sure she was that her unmarried daughter was still a virgin. The mother almost faints whilst the father ducks down, avoiding the confrontation that ensued. 

To put things in order, it is a story about a daughter who plans to migrate to the US after a civil marriage with her 4-year-old boyfriend and obtains her visa. One day, after returning from work earlier than usual, she finds her husband in bed with her best friend. She annuls her wedding.

The 1964 version

In another town, Bangalore, another architect, Sid, is all set to engage his model girlfriend. After a minor misunderstanding, the fiancée decides not to turn up. As is often the case, he goes on bedding beaux one after another for revenge. 

Meanwhile, Shriya realises that her biological clock is ticking away and wants a baby as soon as possible. What does she do? She goes straight for donor insemination. And guess whose sperm she receives? Don't ask how, but she receives Sid's from another state. Sid had once accompanied his gay friend to donate his sperm for future use. Sid does the same. This gay friend reappears later to marry his partner. This became a point of contention for the commentator as if the film is normalising gay weddings in India. For the record, while the third gender is recognised in Indian law, gay weddings are not. 

The purists also have issues with the casual portrayal of alcohol consumption by both sexes and across all layers of society. The familial decorum, such as the parent-child barrier often observed in traditional Indian families, seems to have disappeared. Single parenting is depicted as the most natural thing. It is trying to shove in the Woke's gender agenda. 

Most Indian movies end with all the characters agreeing that the Indian way of life is supreme as if to resolve all the issues. No, not here. The protagonist decides to live with the sperm donor as her live-in partner. 

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Oh Woke, wake up!

One of the most learned members of our clan, Uncle Shan RIP, was once working as the head of a reform school for juvenile delinquents. In his later years, long after his retirement, he used to reminisce about some of the exciting situations he encountered as a counsellor. I remember one such scenario.

By and large, the school inmates were of extremely high intelligence. The only problem was that their true potential was hijacked by negativity. A teenager was admitted after being caught breaking into a home with his friends and sent to reform school. Uncle Shan used to have pep talks with him. The message that stuck with him was what the young man had told him, "if only my father had smacked me on the head the first time I came back home late, I would not have spent how much time outside and got entangled into the wrong crowd!"

The children do not know what they want. Oh, what the heck? Even adults do not. That probably prompted Steve Jobs to say about mobile phones, "People do not know what they want, we will tell them," when one of the designers queried whether customers would buy into their groundbreaking designs on a device named iPhone.

Michael Jackson lamented that he never had a childhood because his father prepared a gruelling, back-breaking regime to make superstars out of the Jacksons. The fact of the matter is that Michael never grew out of childhood, having been caught in a Peter Pan syndrome trapped in Lala land. Michael would not have attained what he had if not for that early bone-bending manoeuvres. The world would probably not have known about Moonwalk either.

Now it seems that the woke culture has permeated every level of society. Of all professions, one would think that the predominantly conservative and cautious medical community, whose motto 'primum non nocere' (first, do no harm), would be guarded against joining the woke frenzy. Apparently not!

It is puzzling why over such a short period in our civilisation, there is a rush to squash what society has planned over millennia, gender separation. Gender is fluid and binary. Pigeon-holing individuals into gender stereotyping is discriminatory, they say. There is an urgent agenda not to assign gender but to allow children, as early as pre-schoolers, to explore, and discover their true gender, not the biological ones they were born into but with which they align psychologically. But at such a young age?

At lightning speed, the medical fraternity is prescribing hormonal therapy and even gender re-assigning surgery to correct the so-called 'Nature's error of gender designation. But guess what, with all the wisdom and breakthrough discoveries that scientists claim to have, early inventions have proved disastrous in many cases. Puberty springs in and offsets the whole arrangement. Then the person is really trapped.

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Wake up to a living nightmare!

Professor Thomas Sowell, the 90-year-old veteran economist and social theorist from Hoover Institute of Stanford University, is still active on social media. He is quick to give his opinion, backed by statistics and historical events, to run down ongoing national policies. He is an opinionated person and at one time was drawn to the idea of communism. His rationalisation for gravitating toward the left is that it is just human nature. He wants to share when one has nothing; conversely, he does not share when he tends to lose his 'hard-earned' possession. Sowell hails from Harlem, working as a postal worker as a young man and pulling himself up by his bootstrap to his current stature.

He often campaigns against affirmative action and minimum wage. He asserts that the Black American community had a better quality of life when the aforementioned policies were pinned upon them. Another recurrent theme in his rhetorics is the importance of the family unit in the upliftment of society. He does not justify the 'Black Life Matters' movement. Instead of blaming mistreatment of the blacks in the hands of a white-centred government, he puts the blame of disparity of the community on the 67% black families that have a single parent to manage their home. Between making ends meet and fulfilling personal needs, the parent has no choice but to leave their kids to the unsupervised influence of members of the neighbourhood. 

On the future of America, he sees a very bleak future. He pinpoints a decline in values like honesty and a sense of entitlement towards this end. To illustrate his point, he compared the black-outs in New York in 1965 and 1977.

During the 1965 power outage,  the incidence of crime was the lowest, whereas, in 1977, it saw plenty of looting and arson. Sowell posits that the 1965 society was one that saw the destruction of WW2 and the hard times that followed. Hence, they had some common decency to protect property and practised traditional morality. The later generation feels that by their existence, they feel entitled. Everybody owes them a living. If they fail, they quickly recoil to blame history, ancestry, and how the earlier society had oppressed them and continue to do so.

That is the mantra of the woke generation - every moment awake is a living nightmare.

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