‘Emmanuelle’ Review: Notionally Revisionist Remake of the Softcore Classic Is One Big Anti-Climax
On paper, a contemporary feminist spin on “Emmanuelle” sounds like a zesty idea. An ostensible portrait of liberated female sexuality firmly ossified in patriarchal politics, Just Jaeckin’s 1974 softcore smash is the kind of cultural touchstone so emblematic of its era that the very act of remaking it qualifies as a symbolic statement of sorts. In practice, however, “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. Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honoring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief; Audrey Diwan’s inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither.
Opening this year’s San Sebastian festival on a tepid note, “Emmanuelle” can only be regarded as a disappointment from Diwan, the writer-director who landed a Golden Lion at Venice three years ago with her tender but tough-minded reproductive rights drama “Happening.” If this seems an unlikely follow-up to such a project, at least on a tonal level, one can nonetheless identify the theoretical tissue connecting two films about a woman’s agency over her own body. Yet “Emmanuelle” has precious little of interest to observe or say about the woman at its center, much less about broader concepts of sex and womanhood, while its erotica is far too tame to attract interest from arthouse voyeurs. First and foremost a work of lifestyle cinema, rich in dark wood and soft furnishings, it’s as attractively and anonymously mounted as an Architectural Digest video, and bound for a commercial no-man’s-or-woman’s-land.
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Mirroring the original by taking the eponymous French heroine on a supposedly erotic voyage of discovery to the Far East, Diwan and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski’s first modernizing order of business is to subtract Emmanuelle’s husband from proceedings and give her a career instead — as a quality control surveyor for a luxury hotel chain, allowing her to do as little actual work as possible in a cushy leisure environment where a high-end mattress is always close at hand. Check, and check. Yet the most surprising departure here from the original is a significant lowering of sexual content: Played by Noémie Merlant with a fixed middle-distance stare and an immaculate, heavily backless designer wardrobe, this new, independent Emmanuelle gets it on slowly and sporadically, between bouts of malcontent corridor-stalking in the name of upheld six-star standards.
In place of copious onscreen intercourse we get, well, yawning expanses of empty space, as the filmmakers stick to the time-honored porn tradition of scant plotting and superficial characterization, minus any attendant sense of winking irony. Unburdened with backstory or even much forwardstory, Emmanuelle is introduced to us in the cushioned white-noise confines of a first-class flight to Hong Kong, where, in a nod to the original, she makes eye contact with a sharp-suited stranger, heads to the bathroom, pulls her underwear to one side, and mile-highs it with wordless, solemn and tastefully blocked efficiency. On the way out, she catches a coolly inquiring look from fellow passenger Kei (Will Sharpe), a cagey engineer who will later introduce himself to her as “a Frequent International Traveler — an FIT.”
If your loins are stirred by this acronym, then Diwan very much has your number. Emmanuelle, however, does not have Kei’s, cuing an agonizingly protracted mating dance around the plush hallways and hospitality suites of the rarefied Rosefield Palace Hotel, where they happen to both be guests. While he plays hard to get, she diverts herself with passing pleasures — a three-way with fellow hotel elites, some heavy breathing and Emily Bront? quotation with local escort Zelda (Chacha Huang) — though an inordinate amount of script acreage is given over to some determinedly non-intriguing corporate intrigue regarding Emmanuelle’s pending performance evaluation of hotel manager Margot (Naomi Watts, looking frankly surprised to be there). This passive-aggressive girlboss duel never rises to the level of actual dramatic stakes.
Not that drama is what viewers want or expect from an “Emmanuelle” riff. Still, in the absence of baser sensual spectacle, it’s something of a relief when Diwan drops in an extended setpiece around a sudden tropical cyclone that disrupts the smooth, soundless workings of the hotel — and, crucially, gives DP Laurent Tangy something to handsomely shoot other than buttery ambient lighting and bedsheets so pristine you could perform open-heart surgery on them. Mostly, however, they stay unrumpled.
Perhaps there’s empowering intent behind the film’s sexual restraint, positioning the modern Emmanuelle as a woman of control and discernment. If so, that’s undercut by a third-act lurch into a somewhat old-fashioned quest for climax (complete with clunky admonitions to “lick upwards”), while there’s strangely little sense of a female gaze informing the stereotypically gauzy sex scenes. (The male form, interestingly, is conspicuously unexposed throughout.)
Both fine writers in French, Diwan and Zlotowski are utterly at sea with mostly English-language dialogue that sounds neither convincingly human nor like a canny parody of tin-eared softcore scripting. Merlant, a long way from the sensory and emotional specificities of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” is too earnest a presence to bring any lascivious camp edge to lines like, “I got a whiff of his scent — a bit peppery.” Indeed, none of the actors exhibits a clear understanding of how to play material at once absurdly banal and wholly resistant to its own comic potential, mostly arriving at the same temperature of disengaged froideur. More than anything else, it’s the Rosefield Palace’s state-of-the-art air conditioning that you feel most palpably through the screen in “Emmanuelle” — a 21st-century blue movie where nobody ever breaks a sweat.
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