- Audrey Diwan’s remake of the 1974 film comes with a feminist twist
The remake of classic erotic drama Emmanuelle returns 50 years after the film shocked viewers around the world with its steamy scenes, but the reprise of the French picture that was notable for its X-rated storyline is just one big anticlimax, critics have said.
The 1974 cult ‘soft porn’ hit starring Sylvia Kristel narrates the erotic adventures of a young French woman who travels to Bangkok, Thailand, to enhance her sexual experiences.
Directed by French filmmaker Just Jaeckin, the adult classic caused quite the stir, with millions flocking to see Kristel, who was presented semi-nude on a poster with a string of pearls dangling over her breasts.
It ran for more than a decade on Paris’ Champs Elysees and Spaniards, who lived under Franco’s dictatorship that saw the scandalous Emmanuelle banned, swarmed to France to watch the racy film.
But the newest version, directed by Audrey Diwan and starring French actress Noemie Merlant, tells a revised tale of Emmanuelle’s sexual awakening as she travels to Hong Kong.
The French-made erotic film was famed for bringing soft-core pornography to mainstream media.
Its starring actress Kristel also became famous for her steamy nude scenes in another 40 films, starring in the lead roles in X-rated versions of Lady Chatterly’s Lover and World War One spy drama Mata Hari.
But in a MeToo age, Diwan’s version, which premiered at the San Sebastian International Festival in Spain over the weekend, seems to have steered from its raunchy sex scenes amid its aim to steer female sexuality and pleasure away from the male gaze.
Speaking to The Times, Diwan said the film is ‘about how we treat pleasure in our society, not just sexual pleasure’, when discussing the film’s surprising lack of graphic sex scenes.
‘If people want to see sex scenes they have the internet’, she said.
But as reviews for the film have trickled in, the overall consensus is that the highly-anticipated remake of the French erotic drama ‘can only be regarded as a disappointment from Diwan’, according to Variety, who called the film ‘one big anticlimax’.
The American magazine said that ‘the most surprising departure here from the 1974 film is a significant lowering of sexual content’, adding that ‘saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honouring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief.’
As for Screen Daily, the updated version of the 1974 soft-porn classic is a ‘paralysingly pointless punch-up’ of the original film, while IMBD called the revival ‘disappointingly hollow’.
Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter has said that the ‘erotic drama Emmanuelle is more or less the embarrassing exercise in pointless revisionist filmmaking most were expecting it to be.’
French newspaper Le Figaro said it doesn’t expect the film to be shown on the Champs-Elysees for ten years.
Some critics have enjoyed the new film’s feminist take, however, with Cine Europa praising it for placing ‘the woman at the forefront as a desiring subject, full of beauty, cinematic power and sensuality’.
