'Emmanuelle' Review: Audrey Diwan's Softcore Remake

An erotic drama that has made us laugh since the first trailer came out Emmanuelle is pretty much the embarrassing exercise in pointless film revision that most people were expecting. It's a work that's all too easy to dismiss as just another example of that 21st-century phenomenon, the revival of a mid-20th-century brand of kitsch but with more pretentiousness, darker lighting, and an utterly fatal lack of humor.

In this case, the original property was a book turned softcore porn film (the tome by Emmanuelle Arsan, the film directed by Just Jaeckin and starring Sylvia Kristel), which became a huge crossover hit in 1974, racked up mountains of box office receipts in mainstream theaters, contributed for better or worse to the debate over the so-called “sexual revolution” of the time, and taught millions of people how to turn ordinary jeans into cutoff shorts.

The sequel to director Audrey Diwan's acclaimed and Golden Lion-winning film about abortion In progress it's unlikely to have that kind of cultural impact (not even in sartorial terms, though Emmanuelle(The '90s revival bias-cut slip dresses are definitely on trend.) In her defense, there's something admirable about her attempt to put female subjectivity and agency in the driver's seat this time around, even if that means creating something that's already a bit of a 21st-century cliché: a sex-positive girlboss story.

As such, there is definitely an audience out there for this, and not just one of viewers who will watch it through the lens of bitchy derision, as funny as it will be. If he's lucky, Emmanuelle might find an afterlife as a kind of Show Girls for its generation, a terrible-fantastic film, undeniably disgusting but strangely captivating, a shameful pleasure in every sense.

Diwan and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski’s screenplay pulls from only the bare bones of the original. That said, both films feel like they were originally written in a certain kind of pretentious but plausible French that lost all plausibility when translated into English. However, where Kristel’s Emmanuelle was a largely passive, barely employed model whose life revolved around her sinister Bangkok diplomat husband and his desires, the new-and-improved Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) is a quality control inspector for a major luxury hotel chain, and thus a career woman in her own right.

After first meeting her while she’s having anhedonic sex a mile up in the air in business class with a total stranger (Harrison Arevalo)—a nod to a familiar scene from the first film—he lands at the Rosefield Palace, a five-star or higher Hong Kong establishment he’s there to appraise. (The credits and press releases indicate that the hotel is a mix of on-location sets at the St. Regis Hong Kong and sets built to represent the luxury suites with their mile-long couches.)

As Emmanuelle gets to work timing the time it takes for the staff to bring her a glass of water and judge the presentation of a lobster with mango reduction, the service goes into a montage mode that, more than anything else, recalls fashion films and other types of covert advertising aimed at the luxury end of the consumer market. There are plenty of beautiful shots of designer freestanding bathtubs and trays of pastries arranged on their cold shelves. It's all very similar.

The actual plot involves Emmanuelle having a threesome with another couple (“enjoying” doesn't seem like the right word, since she never has an orgasm); stalking a tall, dark-haired stranger, Kei Shinohara (Will Sharpe, The White Lotus), who was also on the plane in the opening scene; and dating local escort Zelda (Chacha Huang), who plies her trade in the hotel pool and claims to be a prostitute because she likes a break from her English literature studies.

There’s also a tight plot thread revolving around Emmanuelle trying to find an excuse for the corporation to fire the hotel’s high-priced manager Margot (Naomi Watts, for once using her native British accent), even though the older woman seems to be doing her job impeccably. There’s a little overlap between Margot and Zelda’s storylines in that the former seems to be well aware of what the latter is up to on the grounds of her establishment, which isn’t hard to guess given that the head of security (Anthony Wong) is monitoring everyone’s every move on CCTV. But like the annoying budding flirtation with Kei, this feels deeply underwritten, or like the casualty of cutting room triage.

Ultimately, the film has only one dramatic goal, which is to watch Emmanuelle finally indulge in a moment with another handsome stranger, while asexual Kei watches and translates the lover's instructions into Cantonese, because taking control seems to be the emotional high point of any contemporary erotic story.

In the press release, Diwan talks about a beautiful game that draws inspiration from Chantal Akerman Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels and Lodge Kerrigan Clare Dolan among other titles. To his credit, Emmanuelle seems closer to those nuanced studies of sex work and the complexities of female pleasure than, say, the execrable Fifty Shades of Grey adaptations from a few years ago. As long as the characters here don't open their mouths or at least don't say anything more complicated than “hello” or (while having sex) “faster,” then it's quite enjoyable, even—dare we say it—sexy to watch.

The sometimes discordant but always rhythmic and appropriately pulsating score, by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, casts a strong spell, along with Laurent Tangy's sensual cinematography. It's just that it all seems in the service of a slick-looking advertisement for a product you could never afford, want, or need.