Jacques Audiard’s eighth feature film, the musical-crime thriller-melodrama Emilia Pérez, may very well be his most audacious, but that audacity mostly papers over the huge gaps in its moral universe. The film has been lambasted for its inauthenticity in depicting contemporary Mexico, its culture, and its music (none of the main stars are Mexican-born and the songs were penned by French composer Clément Ducol and singer Camille Dalmais), but its problems run deeper than charges of cultural appropriation. While Audiard’s previous Cannes darlings A Prophet (2009), which won the Grand Prix, and Dheepan (2015), which won the Palme d’Or, centered on conflicted men whose violence was explicable and tragic, the protagonist’s violence in Emilia Pérez is treated as a dramatic given and, even worse, largely ignored at times. It is as if Audiard didn’t want to really deal with the messiness inherent in a protagonist as brutal and cruel (both physically and interpersonally) as the one he gives us here, so he dresses the film up with distracting aesthetic flourishes and florid musical numbers. The ruse doesn’t hold.

The title character, played by Karla Sofía Gascón, begins the film as Manitas, a Mexican drug cartel kingin who hires a struggling lawyer named Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) to enable him to disappear from his present life and begin a new one as a woman. The gender reassignment surgery is not just a bold move to hide his identity, but rather an actualization of a dream he has always had, which in today’s progressive times is meant to immediately endear us to his plight, which is a tall order given the pain and violence he has inflicted and the myriad lives he has ruined. He fakes his own death and has Rita send his bitter, pampered, and likely abused wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their two young sons into hiding in Switzerland. We then fast-forward four years, where Manitas, now happily living a life of posh comfort as Emilia Pérez, reconnects with Rita because she is desperate to be reunited with her children. So, Rita engineers it so that Jessi and their sons come to live with Emilia, but under the ruse that she is one of Manitas’s wealthy cousins. And that is just the first hour.

In its broad contours, Emilia Pérez plays like a moral inverse of A Prophet, which tracked a young, illiterate Arab boy named Malik who is sent to prison and transforms into a sophisticated criminal. It is a powerful drama and a rare crime film, one that makes you concerned not only for Malik’s physical safety, but for the safety of his soul. Emilia Pérez works in the opposite direction, presenting us with Manitas, a brutal man who appears to have no soul to begin with. Once transformed into Emilia Pérez, she appears to discover the humanity she lost as a cartel kingpin, and she endings up investing money and energy into a nonprofit dedicated to finding the bodies of those who have disappeared over the years, many of which were victims of the very cartels that she once led.

However, there is a fundamental problem at the heart of Emilia Pérez that undercuts her narrative-moral trajectory. In a crucial moment about midway through the film, Emilia is talking to Rita about a moment when she first helped a woman find the body of her missing loved one in a mass grave. The woman embraces her, and Emilia confides to Rita, “When she kissed my hand I felt her tears, and for the first time I loved myself.” At the very moment she should have been overcome with feelings for someone else, perhaps ravaged by the accumulated weight of her previous life’s myriad sins, she instead loves herself. This poor woman’s pain, a metonym for the immense violence of Emilia’s former life (the wealth from which she still enjoys lavishly, which keeps her existentially tied to it), is her cue not for empathy, but for self-actualization. How selfish can one be?

Thus, this singular line of dialogue encompasses everything that is morally vacuous and narratively hollow in Emilia Pérez, namely that Emilia never actually changes. Whether as a bearded, tattooed, gold-toothed, gravelly-voiced cartel kingpin who lives in shadows or a smiling, evocative woman of apparent independent wealth who is regularly bathed in sunshine, she is first and foremost all about herself, and whatever happens to those around her—good, bad, or otherwise—matter only insofar as it affects her. Ironically, the film’s best musical sequence, in which Rita crawls around an elite charity dinner packed with drug dealers, crooked politicians, and other criminals, hissing her moral disgust at their hypocrisy via song and dance, just distracts from the film’s own hypocrisy (of which Rita is a major contributor).

Thus, when Emilia turns vicious again in the third act, it comes as no real surprise or dramatic shock because she is simply revealing once again what she apparently has always been, which gives her character no arc, no sense of development, no dramatic heft. Despite all the critical accolades bestowed on Gascón, who is herself a trans-woman previously known as the star of Spanish telenovelas, she is stymied by the vacuity of the role. Emilia has nowhere to go, and her gender reassignment is literally just a drag show because she is just as morally vicious and self-absorbed as a woman as she was as a man.

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