Emmanuelle returns to the cinema, ever further removed from the novel

(Paris) Sixty-five years after the publication of the erotic novel Emmanuelle and fifty years after the release of the cult film of the same title, a brand new version is hitting the screens, very different from its predecessors.

The feature film directed by French director Audrey Diwan is the event on Friday at the opening of the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain (September 20-28).

French actress Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The innocent) is in all the shots. She plays in English, notably giving the reply to Naomi Watts.

This Emmanuelle is moving further and further away from the original 1959 novel, whose Franco-Thai author had already been disappointed by the 1974 feature film. The latter, with Sylvia Kristel, has become a cult classic around the world.

The poster, with Sylvia Kristel and her rattan armchair, has left its mark on the collective memory, symbolizing a stage in the sexual revolution of the 1970s in an era that was still very chaste on screen.

For this third film by Audrey Diwan, who won the Golden Lion in 2021 at Venice with The Eventan adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s story about her abortion, critics expected a Emmanuelle necessarily feminist. However, it is difficult to understand how the character played by Noémie Merlant is.

This Emmanuelle, only referred to as “M^rs Arnaud”, certainly has a managerial job and is independent of any man, unlike the character in the novel. But, on the subject of male-female relationships, she does not profess an opinion nor does she revolutionize them with her sexuality.

“I read the book recreationally. There is one place that interested me, it is a long discussion on eroticism. I wondered if eroticism still had a place in our society,” Audrey Diwan explained to AFP.

Minor transgressions

In the novel, as in the 2024 film, the plots begin on a plane, where the heroine has sex with a stranger. Then, they diverge completely. And for good reason: the filmmaker was unable to buy the adaptation rights, which are no longer for sale to anyone.

There is nothing comparable between the libertinage of the Emmanuelle of the 1950s, between Europeans exiled in a still very exotic Bangkok, and the minor transgressions of the Emmanuelle of the 2020s, in a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.

The novel, one of the world’s masterpieces of erotic literature, has served as a pretext for many occasions.

The character appears in a multitude of kitsch films and TV films, since a first adaptation, Me, Emmanuellein 1969, up to curiosities such as the Black Emmanuelle late 1970s or the Emmanuelle in space from the 1990s.

But the book has been little read. The publisher that is re-releasing it in paperback, L’Archipel, is modestly counting on a print run of 4,000 copies for each of its two volumes.

Deflecting Censorship

Just Jaeckin’s film attracted some 50 million viewers worldwide. Camille Moreau, biographer of the novelist Emmanuelle Arsan, says that the Franco-Thai woman did not like it at all. Half a century later, this doctor of art sciences was herself disappointed by Audrey Diwan’s version.

According to Camille Moreau, author of the essay Emmanuelle Arsan, biography of a pseudonym (editions de La Musardine), the couple who invented the character “had a completely different vision of their work, compared to the enormous commercial success that the film has become.”

In 2005, the author of the 1974 screenplay, Jean-Louis Richard, confided to a journalist that he had not liked the novel: “I refused to meet Emmanuelle Arsan, I didn’t like her book.”

The novel is surrounded by a certain legend. The author, daughter of a good Thai family from Bangkok, had written it with her husband, a French international civil servant, Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane.

Sent to Paris, the manuscript had dazzled a subversive publisher, Éric Losfeld. He had not waited for anyone’s agreement to publish it. To confuse the censors, he had not written on it any name of publishing house or author.