I was sitting around minding my own business one cold and miserable afternoon, cursing the world, God and man, the slide into fascism of the country of which I am a co-citizen, and the wet Saturday afternoon of my conception (S Beckett) when I get a WhatsApp message from a friend.
“I am watching Emilia Pérez,” it begins, “disappointingly it’s not quite as totally f**king shit as I was led to believe. Critics eh? I blame you, Lezard.”
Half an hour later I get a follow-up.
“I take it back, it’s much worse than even my feverish imagination could have hoped for. It’s proper f**king shit.”
Two minutes later, I get a follow-up to that, rather longer, and then another one, two minutes after that. Then the phone rings. It’s him. Obviously his typing can no longer keep up with his outrage. He vents, with the film on pause, for another ten minutes or so and then stops to catch his breath. “I think I’m going to watch it two or three times.”
He invites me over to Sunday lunch with him and his wife and I accept slightly less gladly than I normally do, because he makes it clear we are going to be watching at least the first 40 minutes of Emilia Pérez, just so I can see he wasn’t exaggerating.
OK, it’s my friend Ben, he of the aggrieved correspondence with the council housing department about the junkies in his tower block a couple of weeks back. He seems actually to have got them to do something: after a big article in the Argus, a bored security guard sits on a plastic chair next to a small portable heater in the lobby. It seems that Ben needs to have something to be outraged about, and this week he has settled on the arts. Normally it’s politics, and Lord knows there’s enough material for outrage there. This must be a welcome break. Normally he spends his time getting me to watch things that are good.
“Ben, I don’t have the attention span to watch 86 hour-long episodes, I don’t care how good it is.”
“But you’re missing out on the cultural discourse,” he says. “Your frame of reference will be dismayingly narrow.” And now he wants me to watch something bad. Maybe I should have listened to him and watched something good.
The Sunday lunch is as always delicious but I am full of foreboding, and I cannot carry my end of the conversation. My cutlery screeches across the plate like the violins in Psycho’s shower scene. From what I’ve been told, the next at-least 40 minutes are not going to be pleasant.
I have watched films with Ben before. The kind of films he favours are dark, brooding tales of male toxicity and things going terribly wrong because of it, some of them shot in black and white to make you feel even more alarmed and depressed, but at least they are good – and he keeps silent throughout, except to make a very occasional useful observation, like when he reminded me (ahem) of the plot of The Pardoner’s Tale. However, I now learn that if a film is bad, or especially this bad, he feels the need to commentate throughout.
“They even manage to get the f**king Spanish wrong,” he says early on, “which is quite a first for a Spanish-language movie.”
As I watch, a series of horrors unfolds. At first I wonder why a gangster would ask a state prosecutor to help him get a sex change. Or why that lawyer would complain, in song, about having a “fat ass”, and obligingly patting her bum while she does so (said bum, by the way, looking well within the acceptable range qua bum). But these quibbles become specks in the rear-view mirror when we get to the scene in the gender-change clinic, which involves a chorus of people in bandages singing “Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty!” etc, while wreathed in bandages. There is also a row of people on hospital gurneys, face down, so their own bums are on display, a testament to and endorsement of another thing the clinic can do for you. I have always had something of a problem with musicals – my mother, having been a Broadway star, force-fed them to me from an early age – but never again will I complain when the Jets start singing that there’s going to be a rumble in West Side Story. This is taking the biscuit.
Finer writers than I have listed all the ludicrous plot details, offensive stereotypes, preposterous dialogue and wild departures from anything approaching reality better than I can, and anyway I don’t have the space. With about 40 minutes of the film left, I can’t take any more, and say so. I also feel weak and dizzy, and though it is only a mile and a bit back to the Hove-l, I have to order a cab. I spend the next three days in bed, plucking at the coverlet, plagued by nightmares. I lose track of time; I think I am a day late with filing this column. Anyway, I’m better now, and will no longer curse God and man etc, because I never have to see the rest of that stupid film. It actually made me sick.
[See also: The battle for Labour’s soul]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone