Why is Xenogears freezing?

I'm playing Xenogears on my ePSXe emulator, using a back-up .ISO copy of the game. I do own the game myself, but I prefer playing on the emulator for various reasons. I'm at the point just after the first fight with the Demon of Elnu, where Bart gets his handed to him by an Infinity attack. After the fight, I save and click Continue, and then it switches to Fei in his little flashy-backy thing. It gets to the point where his vision turns into an old-time movie sort of thing, and then the music from the boot-up of the game (the Squaresoft logo music) plays, then the light comes onto little Fei, Fei says "Where am I?", then the game slows to about .5 FPS (even though the emulator says it's moving at a solid 52 FPS). This doesn't speed up even with Frame Limiting turned off. Then, when the camera pans to the point where Fei's sprite is facing SW, it simply stops. Even when it says it's running at over 1000 FPS, it doesn't go anywhere. I put in my friend's disk, and it still does the same thing at the same point. Does anyone know what the hell is happening?