Film of the Week: ‘Emmanuelle’ – An aimless erotic reboot

It was a bit of a shock when Audrey Diwan’s newest film, Emmanuelle, was absent from the line-up of both Cannes and Venice this year – especially on the Lido, as the French director’s previous film, the poignant reproductive rights drama L’Événement (Happening) won the Golden Lion in 2021.

The story goes that Cannes rejected it because the film wasn’t quite ready and needed a few more weeks in the editing room, according to Diwan, and that the Venice selection committee flat out turned it down.

Not a great sign… And upon watching Diwan’s adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s erotic novel, it quickly becomes apparent why the festivals didn’t fight for it.

The 2024 version comes with some weighty expectations. Arsan’s 1959 bestselling novel was originally made into an infamous softcore porn movie which became the most watched film in France in 1974. Seen as the softer cousin to films released in 1972 like Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, it went on to become one of the highest grossing French films of all time. Starring Sylvia Kristel as the titular protagonist who embarks on a series of sexual escapades in Asia, Emmanuelle even remained on the billboard of major Paris cinema UGC Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées for a grand total of 13 years – showing to what extent Just Jaeckin’s film shaped the porn chic sub-genre.

Fast forward 50 years, and Diwan updates the original by siphoning all the misogyny and laughable innuendos, but sadly replaces it with a whole lot of nothing, ending up with an empty vessel that is unlikely to enjoy the same success or cultural impact as its predecessor. 

This new adaptation does start the same way as the original, with a Mile High Club moment with a fellow first class passenger on a plane heading to Hong Kong. Emmanuelle, played by Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Balconettes), is no longer an ingénue but a 35-year-old quality controller working for a high-end hotel chain. She’s traveling to China to carry out an audit on one of the luxury establishments, and as we find out from the plane cubical entanglement, sexual gratification eludes her.

As she begins to prowl the corridors of the Rosefield Palace and appraise the swish services, she meets chatty escort Zelda (Chacha Huang), is ordered to dig up dirt on the manager Margot (Naomi Watts), and has a lifeless threesome with a couple at the bar. And still no satisfaction.

Emmanuelle’s sense of apathy only takes a hit when she meets mysterious hotel client Kei (Will Sharpe). She first spotted him on the plane after her bathroom quickie. He’s FIT – a “Frequent International Traveler” – who never sleeps in his room, cultivates anonymity, and is described by a hotel CCTV operator as a “ghost”.

The two begin a limp game of cat-and-mouse, which gradually reveals him to be both the personification and reflection of her ennui and the erotic fulfilment that constantly eludes her.  

On paper, there’s a rich film here: a contemporary version of Emmanuelle with female agency taking the reins, focusing on the intricacies of suppressed or unchartered female desire yearning to be discovered. However, despite the polished direction and the avoidance of now clichéd Girlboss tropes, this year’s Emmanuelle fails to bewitch in any way. Instead, it bores and ends up as a strangely aimless and dispassionate exercise.

Plaudits do go to Diwan and her co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children) for not making the character of Emmanuelle a mere object of desire for men to appropriate. However, this new version doesn’t say much of anything about desire or the comfort of control. While Diwan dials down the sexual content, her Emmanuelle does include explicit nudity, but none of it arousing. The brief sex scenes are there but all feel sanitised – and with a conspicuous absence of male genitalia; and while numerous backless dresses make an appearance, there’s little sensuality to go with them.

A generous reading of the film’s distinct failure to conjure a sensual or sexually charged atmosphere could be that it mirrors the lack of libidinous satisfaction Emmanuelle feels. However, at no point do you feel like there is something longing to break free. This is chiefly due to the film’s inability to create any sort of identification with the characters, largely because the risible dialogue, which might have worked better in French, sounds about as subtle as a steel dildo to the face in English.

This isn’t helped by the fact that Sharpe’s delivery makes him sound like he’s been despondently dubbed.

Diwan was clearly aiming for the charged eroticism of Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love (an inescapable touchpoint considering the setting), but her film painfully lacks the powerful frisson or tension provoked by people brushing up against one another in corridors in the 2000 classic. Even when (spoiler) Emmanuelle manages to reach orgasm at the end, it doesn’t make up for everything that led up to it; nor is it evocative enough to excuse the film’s rather vapid core message, with limits itself to ‘learn to let go once in a while’.

Emmanuelle’s pulselessness and pointlessness is triply jarring, as Diwan is a filmmaker who has shown her understanding of the female body and women’s agency in Happening.

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Could she have succeeded in making a less flaccid film had she let go of the Emmanuelle name and with it the pressure to subvert its horny spirit, to better make an original (and substantive) feature about the struggles to reconcile female desire with gratification instead? It’s possible. But as it stands, her update of the 70s title goes nowhere slowly, unsettles very little, says even less, and is one massive anti-climax.

Emmanuelle is out now.