Audrey Diwan’s reimagining of Emmanuelle is dull, muddled, and more neurotic than erotic. The Hong Kong set film searches for steam and neon in Wong Kar-wai’s Chunking Mansions and stages a typhoon to jolt some life into the desultory drama but finds mostly tedium. The famous sexual adventuress is nowhere to be found.
Who is Emmanuelle?
In 1959 an erotic novel by French-Thai writer Emmanuelle Arsan (a pseudonym for Marayat Rollet-Andriane) began to be circulated. By 1971 the book which became known as ‘Emmanuelle’ was translated from French into English. 1974 saw the first of many screen adaptations with the release of the French softcore movie directed by Just Jaekin. Emmanuelle starring Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel as the nineteen-year-old wife of a polyamorous and hedonistic diplomat who helps her find her sexual awakening in Bangkok gained a dedicated audience getting an X-rated mainstream release in America.
The Emmanuelle series was famous for its “respectable” pornography marketing, wicker chairs, exotic locations, and spawning many sequels (Kristel played the titular character until 1984 and returned to the role in 1993). ‘Emmanuelle’ became a ‘property’ with versions appearing in Italy (the Black Emanuelle series which eventually veered into Giallo), a Carry On parody, and the name was synonymous with an erotic character type. The sexually curious and transgressive woman who embraced a libertine lifestyle replete with lovers of all ages, genders, classes, and ethnicities.
The vaguely connected Néa (1976) by Nelly Kaplan marketed as Young Emmanuelle was as close as a woman came to directing an Emmanuelle film until it was announced that Audrey Diwan and award-winning dramatic filmmaker was taking on a reboot. Diwan who made the excellent abortion drama Happening had people’s attention with her contemporary reimagining, especially when Noémie Merlant was cast as Emmanuelle. Co-scripted by another award-winning director and writer Rebecca Zlotowski Emmanuelle seemed, at least on paper, to be a serious, sexy, and woman driven reclamation of a character, who before the inevitable decline and confusing over saturation, had a strong female viewership who relatively openly embraced her.
The pedigree of talent involved in Emmanuelle is impressive. Noémie Merlant who starred in Céline Sciamma’s absolutely exquisite lesbian period drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and several other well regarded French films, is an accomplished and bold performer and a director herself. Naomi Watts who plays Margot a luxury hotel manager has been nominated for two academy awards. Will Sharpe who plays Kei the object of Emmanuelle’s interest has a BAFTA and an Emmy nomination. Rebecca Zlotowski isn’t a stranger to sexually frank filmmaking. Audrey Diwan was a novelist and has written screenplays for a variety of genres. The talent behind the camera are noted French film industry creators. Emmanuelle should have been sensational and sensual — instead it is clinical, distant, and confounding.
Who is Emmanuelle in 2024?
Emmanuelle Durand (Merlant) works as a quality controller for a series of high-end luxury hotels. Her job takes her around the world from one first class and pampered experience to the next. She’s chic, intelligent, and indulges in frequent short lived sexual liaisons. She is precise, unsparing, and elegant. She’s also restless and is suffering from ennui.
In the opening scene Diwan concentrates on Emmanuelle’s long legs stretched out in an exclusive first-class aeroplane cubicle. She asks the flight attendant for some lip balm and takes off the outer layer of her clothes until she’s dressed in a slinky green dress. She’s caught the eye of the passenger sitting adjacent to her. She stands and walks slowly to the bathroom. The man follows her. No pleasantries are exchanged. They are having sex at her invitation. It should be exciting for her but there is a hollowness to it. As she takes her seat again the knowing gaze of another passenger unsettles her for a moment before the plane begins its descent into Hong Kong.
The High Life
The Rosefield Palace managed by Margot Parsons (Watts) is expensive. Opulent and designed to feel like an exclusive destination in itself, the hotel anticipates the needs of the guests with orchids reminding guests they are in Asia and macaroons reminding them any delicacy is available. Porters, attendants, wait and bar staff are visibly invisible.
Emmanuelle sinks into her deep bath noting she has a bruise from her mile high encounter. Again, the camera lingers over her naked body. A porter enters her room while she is still bathing. He’s obviously interested in her and for a moment Diwan suggests this will be another sexual encounter for Emmanuelle, but instead she switches into professional mode. Staff are never to overstep. As the person sent to report on why the hotel has been dropping slightly in prestige ranking, Emmanuelle is in effect the most powerful person there, something Margot notes telling her she too was once a ‘shark’ in her position. The hotel stands in for the ‘original’ Emmanuelle’s diplomatic enclave providing her with a serviced lifestyle and a potential playground. It’s also where she again encounters the man, Kei (Sharpe) who watched her on the plane. His dishevelled appearance and lack of interest in the hotel rules (smoking inside) makes her curious. So too his statement about her being concerned with rules but being someone who likes to break them. Emmanuelle’s “rule breaking” includes an unsatisfactory threesome with a young couple and watching an escort work the swimming pool area.
Emmanuelle attends meetings, tours the silent renovations, tastes and rates the specially prepared dishes, takes notes, and meets the man who surveils the staff. She meets a fellow guest, Sir John (Jamie Campbell Bower) who speaks about desire ebbing and flowing and notes that people in luxury hotels are “either on the prowl or on the run,” while in a soaking tub next to her. Sir John is a producer of some kind trapped in the thrall of an arrogant yoghurt advertisement video director who wants everyone to desire her.
Emmanuelle’s proclivities are basically a scribbled laundry list. She follows the escort Zelda (Chacha Huang) who takes clients to a disused garden-set storage shack and watches as she is having sex. Zelda orgasms knowing Emmanuelle is watching. Zelda becomes an initiator for Emmanuelle – some mutual masturbation in the storage shack (the wicker chair appears), coupled with some discussion about claiming pleasure wherever one can. A brief affair between Emmanuelle’s growing obsession with Kei.
The Erotic Vacancy/Vagrancy
Kei Shinohara is called an enigma by the hotel surveillance man. He is a top-tier guest but doesn’t sleep in his suite. He doesn’t accept Emmanuelle’s invitation for sex in a hotel bathroom. He engages Emmanuelle in a discussion where she tells him in detail about the man on the flight – how he had sex with her. The rhythm he set, the sweat on his palms, his cock inside her, his selfish orgasm. Emmanuelle can’t work out if he’s interested in her or not and the contradiction intrigues her.
Diwan and Zlotowski attempt to spice Emmanuelle with versions of intrigue. Is Emmanuelle a construct of corporate capitalism searching for authentic experience through erotic means? Is she looking to be taken outside of her climate controlled, fake jasmine scented existence into something wild and uncontrollable? The answer seems to be yes — she requires some kind of deliverance from the pampered boredom. However, it’s difficult to invest in Emmanuelle and her odyssey because it’s pedestrian and banal.
The erotica of the film is perfunctory for the most part and although the audience sees Emmanuelle’s body, it lacks embodiment. Emmanuelle’s nudity is another outfit she changes into, a lovely dress with supple lines: suggestive but tastefully designed. The sex is as contrived as the dialogue. “This sadness is mine” (Emmanuelle). “I have no desire anymore. I don’t eat, I don’t sleep, I build dams knowing full well the ocean will have the last word” (Kei).
The Body of Ennui
Emmanuelle Arsan’s book was primarily about a young woman enjoying her corporeal pleasures as student and teacher. Her liberation came via embracing pleasure and hedonism. In Diwan’s Emmanuelle pleasure is elusive for its titular character. She is curious but fundamentally depressed and oppressed by her performance as an urbane woman until she meets Zelda who exists on the other end of the socio-economic scale and embraces the freedom that working as an escort affords her. Their all too brief dalliance interrupted by Margot and the hotel chain’s corporate mechanisms ignites something within Emmanuelle to be less passive about both her job and her sexuality.
Emmanuelle moves outside of the Rosefield Palace into the maze of Chunking seeking a legendary men’s club where the women consume diamonds to prove their bravery and their financial worth. Whether or not the club exists becomes a moot point as she is really searching for Kei, a man similarly depressed by the pointlessness of living and reinforcing structures that will eventually disintegrate. Two people who exist to create a sense of safety in a disintegrating milieu circle each other with a vague idea that perhaps a connection will radically change their lives.
A Storm in a Teacup
Emmanuelle ends up being a series of events that Emmanuelle reacts to. A tropical storm that blacks out the Rosefield Palace could arguably be intended as a representation of the pent-up storm within the protagonist where the façade of luxury is threatened by primal forces. That is a generous reading of the emotional state of Emmanuelle who remains mostly inert throughout the film. Getting her hair wet and battening down with Margot to create something ‘magical’ for the Rosefield guests within an unexpected weather event appears to be a highlight in Emmanuelle’s otherwise unsatisfactory life.
Poised and Perfunctory
Diwan’s version of Emmanuelle consistently fizzles out because Emmanuelle herself is a confusing conglomeration. Merlant remains an appealing lead, but she’s given so little to work with beyond beautiful clothes, a camera that adores her, and her innate sensual presence. Without a firm script to anchor what it is Emmanuelle wants and needs the audience is forced into inference and eventually a feeling of, “Is that all there is?”
Rarely transgressive, rarely meeting the measure of sensual, and rarely coherent, Audrey Diwan does little to modernise the Emmanuelle character and even less to make her feel adventurous and feminist. Emmanuelle is perfunctory and unforgivably pedestrian.
Emmanuelle is screening at the Alliance Francais French Film Festival 2025.
Director: Audrey Diwan
Cast: Noémie Merlant, Will Sharpe, Jamie Campbell Bower
Writers: Audrey Diwan, Rebecca Zlotowski, (based on the novel by Emmanuelle Arsan)
Producers: Brahim Chioua, Laurence Clerc, Reginald de Guillebon, Marion Delord, Audrey Diwan, Vincent Maraval, Victor van der Staay, Edouard Weil
Music: Evgeuni Galperine, Sacha Galperine
Cinematography: Laurent Tangy
Editor: Pauline Gaillard
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