Fifty years after the world flocked to watch Emmanuelle, an erotic drama that marked the 1970s, France is about to release a version for the #MeToo era, with the heroine a model of female empowerment.
Directed and written by Audrey Diwan, a highbrow film-maker, the revised tale of a young woman’s sexual adventures in Asia drew withering reviews as it opened the San Sebastian film festival at the weekend. In France, however, the film, starring Noémie Merlant, is being greeted as a cultural milestone.
Diwan, who won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2021 with a drama about abortion, said she has put a post-MeToo twist on the 1974 hit, directed by Just Jaeckin and starring Sylvia Kristel. The film was watched by 50 million people around the world and ran for ten years on the Champs Élysées.
Spaniards, deprived by a censors’ ban, rushed to France to watch it; queues snaked around London cinemas; high-backed “Emmanuelle” chairs packed the shops and seven sequels followed. “I was intrigued by the power of the erotic image of Emmanuelle in the collective consciousness and wondered if you could make it today,” Diwan said. “I wanted to establish a debate about the language of eroticism, which is what you show and hide at the same time.”
Her version of Emmanuelle’s quest for her lost desire was angled for the female gaze, she said. There was no need for the relatively graphic sex in the original. “If people want to see sex scenes, they already have the internet,” she said. The film is “about how we treat pleasure in our society, not just sexual pleasure”.
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The 2024 Emmanuelle is a quality inspector for a luxury hotel chain, not the idle wife of a French diplomat. She rekindles her lost libido in Hong Kong rather than Bangkok. Diwan has retained one famous sequence from the original: Emmanuelle’s sexual encounter with a stranger in the lavatory of the airliner taking her to Asia.
The verdict has been poor so far. The Hollywood Reporter said the film was “more or less the embarrassing exercise in pointless revisionist film-making most were expecting it to be”. It admired “its attempt to put female subjectivity and agency in the driver’s seat this time, even if that’s to create … a sex-positive girl-boss story.”
Variety was scathing. “Emmanuelle is a text so flimsy that reworking it is a bit like trying to defibrillate a blancmange … there’s no pulse of an idea there to activate, much less subvert,” it said. The new Emmanuelle is “unburdened with backstory or even much forward-story”.
In France, critics have mainly held their fire before this week’s opening, while the media have acquainted the younger generation with the phenomenon. Télérama, a high-brow entertainment weekly, recalled the film’s “boost to feminism, the liberation of the body, sexual pleasure free of moral impediment”.
Le Figaro, the leading conservative daily, disliked the new film though it allowed that Merlant’s Emmanuelle “makes a praiseworthy effort not to look like an academic who has won a trip to the other side of the world on the internet”.
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“It will not play for ten years on the Champs Élysées,” it added.
