It’s a surprise to find out that director Audrey Diwan had never seen the original Emmanuelle — a gauzy soft-porn feature that got le tout France hot and bothered when it was allowed to be shown in normal cinemas in 1974 — before she was approached to do this remake, which opens the San Sebastian Film Festival in Competition. In its day, Emmanuelle spawned a string of sequels, each reputedly worse than its predecessors, while star Sylvia Kristel became so immediately famous for taking off her clothes that the expectation blighted her entire career. It also made a huge amount of money.
But what’s most surprising about the fact that Diwan — who made The Happening, which won the Golden Lion in Venice two years ago — had not seen Just Jaeckin’s then-so-scandalous film is that this one seems to be constructed as an answer to it. Both are based on Emmanuelle Arsan’s pseudonymous 1967 novel, structured in the same way. Scene for scene, character for character, Diwan attempts to bang the original’s balls back across the net.
Once again, the story begins with the seductively underdressed Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) in a plane, giving a fellow business-class passenger the eye and then drifting to the cabin toilet, expecting him to follow her. He does. It’s almost an exact repeat of the original. But then she turns to face the mirror, whereupon we see her temptress’ moue fade into 50 shades of dull disappointment. This certainly does put a new spin on things.
Kristel’s Emmanuelle, you may remember, was a newlywed married to a libertine, eager to abandon herself to pleasure in steamy Thailand. Emmanuelle 2.0, by contrast, is a hotel inspector whose latest job also takes her to Asia; this time, however, she’s in frigidly air-conditioned Hong Kong. According to manager Margo (Naomi Watts), whom Emmanuelle has been instructed to get fired, the luxurious detailing of the Rosefield Hotel is designed to bring pleasure to all the senses. Emmanuelle, however, is having no fun at all. She never does. Her focus on the plane, she explains later to Kei (Will Sharpe), a Japanese engineer who was also on board, was on her solitary wait in the cubicle. Would that man come or not? After that, nothing.
Female desire — thwarted, suppressed or yet to be discovered, like our sad Emmanuelle’s — is a potentially rich and earthy subject. The film’s feminist credentials are going to be questioned to hell and back, but Diwan and her co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski deserve recognition for having effectively sectioned the notion of pleasure away from pleasing or pursuing men; Emmanuelle’s gradual thaw is a solipsistic process of self-referential intimacy. Intrigued by the engineer, she visits the hotel room where he never sleeps, drinks his bathwater (it’s the new bondage, that bathwater business) and photographs herself fondling herself on his bed. Snap, snap. That’ll show him.
That’s one odd thing. The women in this story, whether indifferent to sex like Emmanuelle or hot little numbers like Zelda (Chacha Huang), a prostitute whose beat is the hotel pool, thrive on being seen. And they are seen: CCTV cameras, scrutinized almost around the clock by a security guard (Anthony Wong) who really loves his job, follow them everywhere. They know it’s happening. Perhaps performing for the camera is like looking in the mirror, another kind of auto-eroticism.
When Emmanuelle does escape the Rosefield and, by extension, her arid life, it is by seeking out Kei in a gambling den hidden behind the stalls in a squalid shopping mall where, as he tells her, everyone cheats. Kei is a match for the aging roué Marco in the first Emmanuelle, who wasn’t up for sex himself but gained satisfaction from pimping her out as the prize at a boxing match. Kei does nothing so savage; if anything, he seems to share Emmanuelle’s ennui, desiring nothing, including Emmanuelle. His professional specialty is building dams to contain the rising oceans. It’s profitable but, as he tells her, completely pointless: the ocean will win in the end.
Sharpe plays this with a restrained cool that still allows some suggestion that he has dirt under his fingernails; Watts is even cooler as the hotel’s ruling ice queen, her voice sounding as if each word has splintered off a glacier. All the actors are, in fact, so much better than their material that they almost succeed in turning the story of Emmanuelle’s awakening — which comes eventually and inevitably, with a protracted sigh merging with the aftergasm of credits — into something strange and interesting.
In fact, there is a kind of intriguing oddness to this erotica nouveau. Through one of The Eye’s security cameras, we might see this absurdly overstated hotel as a Cronenbergian netherworld, full of patisserie and exotic flowers that bloom and then, like tired metaphors, duly droop: a capsule of late capitalism. Swap screens and we might glimpse women wanting something for themselves, rather than simply falling in with men’s desires, because that is there too.
Through another lens, however, the whole undertaking would look as impotently pointless as one of Kei’s dams. Which it really is, weighed down by that name. What were they thinking? Make a paean to female desire, by all means, but there’s no fixing up Emmanuelle.
Title: Emmanuelle
Festival: San Sebastian (Competition)
Director: Audrey Diwan
Screenwriters: Audrey Diwan and Rebecca Zlotowski
Cast: Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe, Chacha Huang, Anthony Wong, Jamie Campbell Bower
Sales agent: The Veterans
Running time: 1 hr 45 mins
