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.

Mexican Gilberto Ramirez defeats Briton Chris Billam-Smith in Saudi Arabia to become the unified WBA and WBO cruiserweight champion.

Rival criminal factions are battling for control in the Mexican state of Sinaloa after the arrests of two drug lords.

Under a Donald Trump presidency, a proposed 25% tariff on Mexican imports could lead to significant price increases on popular clothing brands. Companies such as Levi’s, Nike (NKE), and Patagonia, which source a portion of their products from Mexico, may have no choice but to pass those costs onto consumers.

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Maybe it was always building to this: thousands of people singing and dancing to “Macho Man,” some sporting neon safety vests, others in actual trash bags, a symbolic expression of solidarity with their authoritarian hero whose final week on the campaign trail has revolved around the word garbage.

Where will the MAGA movement go from here? Trump had an answer last night, at least for the short term. He wasn’t telegraphing an Election Day victory—he was preparing, once again, to label his opponents “cheaters” and to challenge a potential defeat.

The evening’s host, Tucker Carlson, said that for most of his life as a journalist, he’d imagined that one would have to be “bereft of a soul” to stand onstage and support a politician. “And here I am with a full-throated, utterly sincere endorsement of Donald Trump.”

On with the show.

As I wandered around Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, last night, this iteration of Trumpism felt slightly different, if not wholly novel. Nine years ago, Trump held one of his first MAGA rallies not far from this venue. “Donald Trump Defiantly Rallies a New ‘Silent Majority’ in a Visit to Arizona” read a New York Times headline from July 11, 2015. Charlie Kirk, one of last night’s warm-up speakers, put it thusly: “This state helped launch the movement that has swept the globe.” All of the elements Trump needed to stoke the fire back then were still here last night: the Mexican border debate, inflamed racial tensions, metastasizing political extremism. Trump’s movement has grown, and his red MAGA hat has become a cultural touchstone. As the Arizona sun set, though, his nearly decade-long campaign of fear and despotism also had a surprising air of denouement.

Trump told Carlson he doesn’t like to look back. But last night, as he rambled (and rambled), he was sporadically reflective about all that had led to this point in his life. Trump sat in a leather chair with just a handheld mic—no teleprompter, no notes. He mostly ignored Carlson’s questions and instead tossed out ideas at random—what he calls “the weave.” In reality, it’s less lucid than he believes; more of a zigzag across years of personal triumphs and troubles. Remember “Russia, Russia, Russia”? Remember the “China virus”? Remember the time he courageously pardoned Scooter Libby? Remember how good he used to be at firing people on The Apprentice? Remember the crowd at that one Alabama rally? All of this, in his mind, amounted to something akin to a closing argument.

The event was a hurricane-relief benefit billed as Tucker Carlson Live With Special Guest Donald J. Trump. But Carlson barely spoke. Instead, he sat back in his own chair, occasionally picking at his fingers, looking somewhat mystified that this was where he’d ended up in his career, hosting Inside the Authoritarian’s Studio. He had taken the stage to the sounds of Kid Rock, but he looked as preppy as ever in a navy blazer, a gingham shirt, a striped tie, and khakis. He insisted, twice, that he had bent the knee to Donald Trump without shame. Trump, he marveled, had shown him what a sham D.C. was. He lamented how those inside the Beltway treated Trump “like he was a dangerous freak, like he’d just escaped from the state mental institution.”

Carlson has grown more radical since Fox News fired him. Last night, he claimed, for instance, that the CIA and the FBI have been working with the Democratic Party to take Trump down. He implied that funding for Ukraine isn’t going to the military but is instead lining the pockets of the Washington elite: “Have you been to McLean recently?”

The man he unabashedly endorsed, meanwhile, again spoke of “the enemy within,” and attacked the enemy of the people (the media). Trump once again demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as a “low-IQ individual” and “dumb as a rock.” He claimed that members of the January 6 “unselect committee” had burned, destroyed, and deleted all the evidence it had collected because, in the end, they found out that Nancy Pelosi was at fault (this bit was especially hard to follow). He called for enlisting the “radical war hawk” Liz Cheney into combat: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Trump blew some of his usual autocratic dog whistles, saying, for instance, that anyone who burns an American flag should be sentenced to a year in prison. He suggested that loyalists and extremists will fill his next administration, should it exist. He implied that he’d bring in Elon Musk to find ways to slash the federal budget, and let Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and a conspiracy theorist, examine public-health matters. “He can do anything he wants,” Trump said of Kennedy.

But perhaps the most meaningful moment of the night was when Trump said matter-of-factly that he won’t run for president again. He instead hinted that his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, will be a top 2028 contender. Win or lose, this was it, his last dystopian rodeo. Trump spoke almost wistfully about suddenly approaching the end of his never-ending rally tour. He sounded like a kid moving to a new neighborhood and a new middle school. He told his friends he’d miss them. “We’ll meet, but it’ll be different,” he said. He was in no rush to leave the stage.

The big question going into Tuesday’s election is whether the MAGA movement will fizzle out should Trump lose. Although Trump himself seems more exhausted than usual these days, his supporters are as fired up as ever. “Fight! Fight! Fight!” chants— a reference to Trump’s now-infamous response to the July attempt on his life—broke out among the crowd as people waited to pass through Secret Service checkpoints. I passed a man in a brown wig, a pink blazer, and a green top that read Kamala Toe, the words gesturing toward his crotch. I saw a woman wearing gold Trump-branded sneakers, and many people with Musk’s Dark MAGA hat. The latter seemed particularly notable: In addition to getting behind Vance, Trump might be inclined to pass the torch to another nonpolitician—namely, someone like Musk.

For now, though, Trump is returning to his conspiratorial election denialism. Four years ago, he tried to undermine the results in Arizona, Georgia, and other states. Last night, he singled out Pennsylvania. (A day earlier, his campaign had filed a lawsuit in the state, alleging voter suppression.) “It’s hard to believe I’m winning, it seems by a lot, if they don’t cheat too much,” he said, alleging malfeasance in York and Lancaster counties. Whether he succeeds or fails, the detritus that Trump has left behind will likely linger. “Look around, Mr. President, because there’s a lot of garbage here!” Charlie Kirk said earlier in the night. “Go to the polls on Tuesday and make sure that we all ride that big garbage truck to Washington, D.C.,” Kennedy, who was one of the warm-up speakers, implored.

Trump, though, opined with uncharacteristic nostalgia: “When I was a young guy, I loved—I always loved the whole thing, the concept of the history and all of the things that can happen.” He sounded fleetingly earnest. He has undoubtedly cemented his place in history. Or, as Carlson put it earlier in the night: “Almost 10 years later, he has completely transformed the country and the world.”

Related:

Trump suggests training guns on Liz Cheney’s face. A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks

Today’s News

The White House altered its transcript of President Joe Biden’s call with Latino activists, during which official stenographers recorded that Biden called Trump supporters “garbage,” according to the Associated Press. The White House denied that Biden had been referring to Trump voters. During a meeting in Moscow, North Korea’s foreign minister pledged to support Russia until it wins the war against Ukraine. The price of Donald Trump’s social-media stock fell another 14 percent today, amounting to a loss of more than 40 percent over three days.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Although AI regulation is the rare issue that Trump and Harris actually agree on, partisanship threatens to halt years of bipartisan momentum, Damon Beres writes. The Books Briefing: These books are must-reads for Americans before Election Day, Boris Kachka writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Katie Martin

This Might Be a Turning Point for Child-Free Voters

By Faith Hill

When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Robert Viglasky / Disney / Hulu

Watch. Rivals (streaming on Hulu) is the silliest, sexiest show of the year, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Listen. We Live Here Now, a podcast by Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, who found out that their new neighbors were supporting January 6 insurrectionists.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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