No comment: Farmers protesting against the MERCOSUR treaty block traffic in southern France

Early in the film Emilia Pérez, a lawyer named Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is kidnapped and stuffed inside a van, with a hood placed over her head. “Are you afraid?” her kidnapper asks.

Rita, trembling and breathing heavily as she’s taken from one vehicle to another, certainly seems so. Yet the audience’s attention is led elsewhere. The camera lingers on her kidnapper’s mannerisms: the rings they twirl on their fingers, the way they nervously tuck a piece of hair behind their right ear. As vulnerable as Rita is, the person sitting across from her seems to feel the same way. The scene is disorienting for its characters and its viewers at once—and becomes only more so when Rita’s kidnapper anxiously confesses, in song, to a desire to transition and live as a woman.

Viewers may remain disoriented throughout Emilia Pérez, a film so aesthetically daring and tonally scattered that it defies simple explanation. Directed by the French auteur Jacques Audiard, best known for his delicately told stories about starting over, the Spanish-language film follows a Mexican drug dealer played by Karla Sofía Gascón who, after enlisting Rita’s help to undergo gender-affirming surgery, leaves her old life behind. She emerges with a new name—Emilia Pérez—and a new passion for undoing the harm she did as a kingpin. But she also hopes to reunite with her grieving wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their children without revealing who she is.

The film shape-shifts to keep up with the aftermath of Emilia’s transition: Sometimes, it’s a prestige narco-thriller about a criminal making a difficult escape. Other times, it’s a black comedy bathed in telenovela tropes. Its most consistent mode, however, is musical: Without warning, characters will often burst into song and dance. Emilia Pérez tells a story about the infinite challenges of self-actualization, and it seems to revel in its contradictions, mixing crassness with tenderness, pastiche with originality, silliness with sincerity. It’s emotionally manipulative. It’s visually over-the-top. It’s a mess, in other words—a spectacular, operatic one.

It has also inspired outsize reactions and heated discourse. Since Emilia Pérez premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where its leads shared the Best Actress Award, the film has been met with challenging questions: Is it trafficking in transphobic stereotypes or pushing trans representation forward? Is it philosophically hollow or sneakily incisive? Yet both the fevered praise and harsh criticism—which have sharpened after the film’s Netflix debut this week—underline the story’s boldness, proving that perhaps Emilia Pérez’s greatest asset is its lack of inhibition. Its very appeal comes from its provocative nature; it baits people into forming strong opinions.

[Read: How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie]?

For more than two hours, Emilia toys with its viewers’ expectations for a story about a transgender protagonist. Rather than following in the footsteps of other notable projects about transition—say, drilling into the physical and emotional aspects of the process—the film deliberately makes jarring, contradictory choices. Emilia finds a touching, redemptive romance with Epifanía (Adriana Paz), the widow of a cartel victim, but she also confesses to feeling as if she’s now “half him, half her,” referring to the years she spent presenting as Manitas, a man. When Emilia learns Jessi has fallen in love with an ex, she attacks Jessi rather than revealing who she is, and the voice she had pretransition—a lower, huskier growl—emerges in their confrontation. Her attempts at freedom, the film seems to suggest, lead only to more pain for her and those around her. But then the movie ends with a song called “Las Damas Que Pasan,” which sanctifies Emilia as a “brave figure” with “marvelous grace” who “filled us with happiness.” The film seems to be rooting for her and against her at once, a noncommittal attitude that’s somewhat frustrating to watch. Emilia’s arc can be read as punishing its heroine or as an attempt to depict how complicated rebirth can be.

Many of the songs are also at odds with themselves. Scenes abruptly change in tone, such as when a sweet ballad sung by Emilia’s son about how he’s picked up the scent of “papá” around her flows into a grim tune about unidentified bodies of cartel victims. And at times, the musical genre of the track doesn’t comfortably match its subject matter: In “El Mal,” Rita condemns the corruption of donors behind Emilia’s new nonprofit organization in a gleeful rap. “La Vaginoplastia” is an upbeat pop song in which medical staff describe the process of gender-affirming surgery in outrageously insensitive terms (“Vaginoplasty makes the men happy,” they chant). Absurdity and earnestness go hand in hand throughout the film, providing a discordant—and disarming—contrast.

It seems that conjuring such discomfort is the point. Despite telling the story of a trans woman, Emilia Pérez furthers binary, gendered stereotypes—as Manitas, Emilia was vulgar and aggressive; now she is soft and maternal. But it distorts them too, in a way that invites its audience to consider their reactions to the material. Take the scene of Rita talking to a doctor she’s persuading to perform Emilia’s surgery. They’re two cis people arguing about transition without Emilia present, making sweeping pronouncements in a duet that sounds more appropriate for a pair of lovers. These elements clash with one another, and the sentiments expressed sound off-putting; I certainly bristled at the lyric “If he’s a he, she’ll be a he / If he’s a she, she’ll be a she” for how reductive it sounds. But the scene replicates a conversational dynamic that often plays out in reality, in which the rights of trans people are debated without trans people actually in the room.

[Read: When are trans actors allowed to act?]

Given how few mainstream films exist about the trans experience, any attempt at portraying it carries the weight of representation, regardless of its objectives. With Emilia Pérez’s current accolades, and the talent now campaigning for more, reckoning with that responsibility is probably unavoidable. But beyond casting a trans actor to play Emilia (unlike, say, when Felicity Huffman and Eddie Redmayne starred as transgender characters), Emilia Pérez intentionally pursues a dreamlike artificiality that helps it avoid any expectation of offering real-world significance. Audiard shot the film in France, with Mexico City reconstructed as a backdrop in a studio. He didn’t require every member of the Spanish-speaking cast to adopt accurate Mexican accents, making their characters match the actors’ backgrounds instead. And according to Gascón, the idea to apply a simple, pat approach to Emilia’s transition was one she and Audiard came up with together. “I think we nailed it,” she said in an interview, “especially—I remember this perfectly—when Jacques understood that Emilia was inside Manitas.”

Emilia Pérez tantalizes its audience with doubts over whether it’s at all serious about its subject, or an important entry into the pantheon of trans portraits on-screen. I suspect that the film may not hold up well over time, what with its ludicrous lyrics and disjointed tone, but its energetic flair and unabashed audacity make it undeniably exciting to take in. In a way, it reflects its protagonist. Emilia’s every move is an unexpected one, but she doesn’t care to explain herself; she only wants people to hear her out. “Hearing is accepting,” she sings early in the film. Love it or hate it, there’s no denying Emilia Pérez.

“On the record? We’re as calm as calm can be,” a European official assured me last week when I called him to ask what he thought about the reelection of Donald Trump.

His answer surprised me. I’d first met the official earlier this year when I was reporting on European allies’ view of the U.S. presidential election. Back then, almost every leader and diplomat I interviewed expressed dread at the prospect of Trump’s return to power; this same official had described the stakes as “existential” for his country. The reasons for the anxiety were obvious: Russia was waging war on NATO’s doorstep, and America, the alliance’s most powerful member by far, appeared to be on the verge of reelecting a president who had, among other things, said he’d encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries he considers freeloaders. Yet now, the official on the other end of the line was talking optimistically about the “transatlantic cooperation” his government looked forward to fostering with its partners in Washington, and “working toward strong relationships with the new administration.”

[Read: What Europe fears]

“We approach the next Trump presidency with calm and focus, not wobbling and panic,” he confidently declared.

Then he asked if he could speak anonymously. I agreed. “Obviously,” he said, “a million things could go wrong.”

Political leaders and diplomats across Europe are clear-eyed about the threat that the next president will pose—and yet they can do very little about it. “The overall level of anxiousness is fairly high,” the official told me. “People are expecting turbulence.” America’s allies now know that they can’t simply ride out a Trump term and wait for a snap back to normalcy. So far this century, Americans have elected George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Trump again. “Predictability is gone,” he said. “The pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.”

In the short term, sources told me, the plan is to cozy up to Trump and those close to him and hope for the best. In the long term, a growing consensus has emerged that Europe will need to prepare for a world in which it no longer counts on America for protection.

Wolfgang Ischinger, a veteran German diplomat who has served as ambassador to the United States, is among those urging calm. He has publicly cautioned European leaders against “finger wagging” in their interactions with the president-elect, and said they should take a wait-and-see approach when it comes to Trump’s foreign policy. Like other Europeans I spoke with, he was relieved by the choice of Marco Rubio—who has signaled support for NATO and has traditional views of America’s role in the world—for secretary of state. Ischinger also welcomed the realism that has shaped Europe’s response so far to Trump’s reelection. “We’re just going to have to deal with him—we’re prepared to deal with him.”

European officials, who have spent years planning for this contingency, are working to deepen personal relationships with Trump’s Republican allies, Ischinger told me, and talking about gestures they could make to flatter him. But these efforts will almost certainly face resistance from the European public, which, he said, broadly finds Trump repellent and even sinister. “I see a lot of disdain and panic,” he told me.

These reactions were reflected in the postelection headlines in the European press, which greeted Trump’s return with a mix of bafflement, scorn, and Apprentice puns. “What Have They Done … Again?” asked the cover of Britain’s Daily Mirror. The Guardian plastered its cover with the words “American dread.” And an op-ed on the homepage of the German newspaper Die Zeit resorted to English to capture the moment with a four-letter headline: “Fuck.”

Behind the scenes, Ischinger told me, European leaders have discussed inviting Trump to a capital for a grand state visit where allies could roll out the red carpet and hopefully cultivate some good will. But Ischinger worries that such an attempt could backfire. “I cannot imagine any such scenario in any German-French-Spanish-Italian city where you would not have huge anti-Trump demonstrations, probably really ugly ones,” he told me. “Organizing a decent visit for Mr. Trump would really be quite a nightmare for the police.”

Ischinger told me that the return of Trump and his hard-edged “America First” policy is emboldening Europeans who have been arguing that the continent needs more independence from its most powerful ally. Ischinger himself seems to be listening. When we spoke earlier this year, he was somewhat dismissive of the idea that Europe could chart a post-America course, at least in the near term. “Dreaming about strategic autonomy for Europe is a wonderful vision for maybe the next 50 years,” he told me in March. “But right now, we need America more than ever.”

Last week, though, he spoke urgently of the need for Europe to start manufacturing more of its own weapons and get serious about being able to defend its borders. “Are we finally going to wake up to the fact that we cannot rely forever on being protected by the United States?” he asked. He said he doesn’t believe that Trump will move to withdraw from NATO, but the fact that it’s even a question puts Europe in a deeply precarious position. The U.S. has more troops stationed in Europe (about 85,000) than the entire militaries of Belgium, Sweden, and Portugal combined. It provides essential air-force, intelligence-gathering, and ballistic-missile defense capabilities; covers about 16 percent of NATO’s operating costs; and manufactures most of the weapons that are bought by European militaries. Ischinger said that the situation is untenable: It’s just too risky to rely indefinitely on American military might to deter Russian aggression in the region. “We have a war now. This is urgent—this is not just political theory,” he told me. “This is a decisive moment in European history.”

Meanwhile, some in Europe are looking beyond the immediate military implications of Trump’s election. At Faith Angle Europe, an annual conference hosted last week by the Aspen Institute in France, journalists and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic gathered in a resort on the French Riviera and, in between pastry buffets and dips in the pool, contemplated the potential end of liberal democracy in America. To many in Europe, Trump’s election looks less like a historical fluke or “black swan event” and more like the climactic achievement of a right-wing populism that has been upending politics on their continent for much of this century—the same forces that led to Brexit in the United Kingdom, brought Giorgia Meloni to power in Italy, and made Marine Le Pen a major player in France. Not all Europeans, of course, are put off by the brand of politics that Trump represents

Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist who has worked as an adviser for the ministry of foreign affairs and the European Union, predicted that Trump’s victory would “galvanize” far-right movements around the world. “They feel they really are on a roll, and they probably are,” she told attendees at the conference. “There’s a sense of legitimization … If this is happening in the heart of liberal democracy, surely you can’t make the argument that this happening in Europe is undemocratic.”

In recent years, Tocci said, far-right leaders in Europe were on their best behavior, eager not to alienate America by, say, airing their real views about Putin and Ukraine. Now that Biden, a classic transatlanticist, is set to be replaced with Trump, she said, “there’s going to be quite a lot of lowering of the masks.”

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

Maçães, like others I talked with, was eager not to be seen as hysterical or fatalistic. He said he didn’t think Trump’s foreign-policy appointments so far have been disastrous. But when he looked at the people Trump was naming to key domestic positions, most notably Matt Gaetz as attorney general, he found it hard to see anything other than a profound deterioration of political culture and democratic norms. “Americans have more reason to worry than the rest of the world,” he said.