Sex kitten Emmanuelle returns as a sad product of modern sexuality

It is hard to imagine now, when any kind of pornography is just a click away, what an impact Emmanuelle had on its release in 1974. The breathy, gauzy account of the sexual misadventures of a young French expatriate wife in Bangkok was not the first soft-porn film to jump into the mainstream – the more explicit Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door beat it by a couple of years – but it was altogether a more beautiful package.

It was also a hit, reaching number three at the US box office that year. Numerous sequels and knock-offs followed, while the original continued to be shown at a cinema in the Champs Elysees for 13 years.

Why did it work? Emmanuelle was based on a trashy novel, first published in 1959, by a pseudonymous “Emmanuelle Arsan” who later turned out to be a French diplomat stationed in Thailand, presumably with time on his hands. It wasn’t a good film. It was atrociously dubbed. But it had high production values, exotic cultural notes, some solemn theorising about the nature of the erotic (giving it a drop of European seriousness) and winsome Sylvia Kristel – a Dutch model who wanted to break into acting – under the camera’s constant caress.

Sylvia Krystel in a scene from the original Emmanuelle.

Emmanuelle’s endless simulated sexual encounters look astonishingly cheesy now. They are also unmistakably a male fantasy: a woman’s supposed sensual awakening entirely orchestrated by the men around her. At first, she fiddles with other trophy wives, before being taken up by an elderly roué who steers her to an opium den where he invites a couple of patrons to rape her. Kristel argued against this scene, which now looks as dreadful as it sounds, but director Just Jaeckin said they had to do it because it was in the book.

He said later he just wanted to make “something soft and beautiful, with a nice story”. While Kristel would star in three sequels, he refused to make another one. Emmanuelle was not the springboard either had imagined; Kristel was never taken seriously as an actor, while Jaeckin’s career as a photographer was permanently stunted by his brush with the raincoat brigade.

Given this history – not to mention the convulsions in gender politics of the intervening 50 years – it was certainly a surprise when Emmanuelle was revived by French producers, this time to be directed by the impeccably feminist Audrey Diwan. It was a bold idea. Diwan won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 with The Happening, a powerful film about a young woman seeking an abortion in provincial France in the early ’60s. She came to Emmanuelle, she says, from a position of relative ignorance. To this day, she has seen only 20 minutes of Jaeckin’s Vaseline fantasy.

“I clearly understood this wasn’t made for me as an audience, like I was not invited,” she said at last September’s San Sebastian Film Festival, where her film screened on opening night. She was intrigued, however, by the idea of discussing the erotic from a woman’s point of view, still more by the challenge of finding a cinematic language that would make that possible for modern audiences.

“The movie of the ’70s was strong because it was about opening the frame. Whereas I want to restrain the frame. Now everyone can see everything, does it still work? That was the first thing.” She read the book, then let the character – or whatever Emmanuelle might become – sit with her.

In the script she eventually wrote with Rebecca Zlotowski, Emmanuelle is no longer a trophy wife. Now played by Noemie Merlant, she has a high-flying job – literally – visiting and evaluating luxury hotels, where armies of service workers ensure that every detail of life in the bubble is perfect. Her destination is not languorous Thailand but bustling Hong Kong, where she is tasked with finding a reason to sack the Rosefield Hotel’s manager Margot (Naomi Watts).

Noemie Merlant, right, and Chacha Huang in the new Emmanuelle.Credit: Rialto Films

On the way, in an echo of the opening scene in the first film, she has sex with a stranger in the plane’s toilet. The original Emmanuelle declared herself only interested in pursuing pleasure. In Diwan’s film, she grits her teeth through the act, then returns to her seat with an expression of dull disappointment. The former sex kitten is now a picture of emptiness.

Merlant, who is most immediately recognisable as the feisty painter in Portrait of a Woman on Fire, says she immediately recognised herself in the new Emmanuelle. “At the beginning of the movie, you have this woman who did not feel anything belonged to her, including her body,” she says. “She doesn’t get pleasure; she tries to make others satisfied. She is a robot. For me, it makes a lot of sense, so I said yes.”

Merlant started modelling when she was 17. On her first job, she was sexually assaulted; when she told her agents what had happened, she was told it was her fault for not refusing clearly enough. This must be adult life, she decided; she would have to protect herself. Like Emmanuelle, she says, she shut down.

“For years I couldn’t cry any more. It’s like the only place I could cry was when I was shooting in films. And laugh. Like I could be alive only when I was shooting.”

Noemie Merlant goes in search of sexual awakening in the new Emmanuelle.Credit: Rialto Films

She played another role in everyday life. “The role society gave me when I was young, the role I played for others, for men, not for myself.” What she wanted in reality, she says, eluded her. “We have been used for men’s pleasure for centuries,” she says. “We don’t even know what we want. That’s what I felt. With the #MeToo movement, I realised that things were not right.” Emmanuelle’s quest is to find her way back to her own desire. “‘How do I get there? It takes time and then I’m going to say what I want out loud.’ This was very strong for me.”

Watching Emmanuelle drift to the toilet on the plane is Kei (The White Lotus’ Will Sharpe), a Japanese engineer whom she later meets in the hotel. He is as sexually numb as she is, but he is interested in her life; he questions her with gentle curiosity, peeling away her layers of icy control.

Director Audrey Diwan on the set of Emmanuelle with Noemie Merlant. Credit: Rialto Films

Like the raddled Mario in the first Emmanuelle, he introduces her to an Asian underbelly of grubby, druggy mahjong dens, a world away from the opulent artificiality of the hotel. Unlike Mario, he is not a voyeur or a sadist.

“He is here for her, he wants her to have space,” says Merlant. “He is a listener. And, most of the time, we are not listened to.” When her Emmanuelle does say what she wants, it is as if a wall has crumbled.

The new Emmanuelle was rejected by the bigger festivals, Cannes and Venice; when it finally had its premiere, some reviews were startlingly vicious. “I think people are not happy to see a movie where Emmanuelle is sad and empty,” says Merlant.

Diwan says, however, that younger generations – for whom ’70s nostalgia means nothing – relate strongly to the characters’ loneliness. Many say they don’t want to have sex at all, which she puts down to fear: they are afraid of falling short of their online images. Maybe they are as sad as Emmanuelle; at least we can talk about it.

Emmanuelle is in limited release from May 8, and streaming from June 3.