Directed by Audrey Diwan | Written by Diwan and Rebecca Zlotowski, based on the novel by Emmanuelle Arsan | 107 min | ▲▲▲ | on VOD
For those who may not know, or remember, the Emmanuelle series was a wildly popular collection of softcore porn dramas in the 1970s and 1980s, both theatrical and the made-for-TV variety. Originally, they were adapting a popular French novel about a sexually adventuresome married woman, and starred Sylvia Kristel in the lead. They were marketed as sophisticated, elegant, and European, but always seemed a little trashy from the VHS boxes perched high up on the rental store shelves. All that soft-focus imagery.
But the legacy is notable: No Emmanuelle; no Nine and a Half Weeks, no Showgirls, no 50 Shades of Grey.
The reboot more loosely adapts the original material in a genuinely new light, any suggestion of camp scrubbed away. Noémie Merlant (Portrait Of A Lady on Fire) is our lead, a quality controller for a luxury hotel brand visiting a flagship location in Hong Kong. Her sensuality is profligate, she engages in casual sexual encounters with men and women — but doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy them — while ostensibly working to figure out why the hotel isn’t meeting standards and to pin this failure on its manager, Margot (Naomi Watts).
She crosses paths with a few recurring, enigmatic characters including a sex worker, Zelda (Chacha Huang), and an engineer, Kei Shinohara (Will Sharpe), who has a room at the hotel but doesn’t sleep in it, instead wandering the halls, smoking.
The film is exquisitely shot (by Laurent Tangy), its actors lit to accentuate their most fetching features and supported by a terrific score (from Evgueni and Sacha Galperine). With the movie set almost entirely in a hotel, that essential element of comfort in impermanence welcomes a lot of allegorical possibility, but the lead character’s journey towards self-actualization via sex is disappointingly austere — we rarely get a sense of Emmanuelle’s internal life, which leaves a lot of gleaming, glowing, and gorgeous surfaces to enjoy, but not much else.
The issue here seems to be the script, mostly in English, written by screenwriters whose first language is French — too bad they didn’t keep it in the original tongue. (Zlotowski is the co-writer and director of the forthcoming Jodie Foster picture, A Private Life.)
A sweet stretch of romance and redemption in the third act goes some way to warming the more flinty elements that went before. Emmanuelle serves up a seduction of imagery, and the filmmakers, so many women credited behind the camera, are finally in control of this semi-iconic material famously about women’s pleasure, which is no bad thing.
