“Emmanuelle” returns in a feminist, political and ultra-aesthetic version by Audrey Diwan

This new version without the rattan armchair offers a look at female desire that goes against the grain of the film that aroused an entire generation in the 1970s.

Exactly fifty years after the first adaptation ofEmmanuelle signed Just Jaeckin in 1974, with Sylvia Kristel in the title role of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel, published in 1959, the director Audrey Diwan takes this text to make a version that goes against the grain. Feminist and political, this highly anticipated new vintage ofEmmanuelle is presented at the opening of the 72nd San Sebastian Festival, a few days before its release in theaters September 25, 2024.

Emmanuelle goes to Hong Kong to assess the boss of one of the luxury hotels of the group she works for. Barely boarding the plane, the young woman transforms this professional trip into an erotic experiment, with a first adventure (obviously not particularly satisfying) in the business class toilets. On the plane, she meets Kei’s gaze, whom she will meet again later in the corridors of the hotel.

In this place seemingly disconnected from reality, Emmanuelle wanders like a vestal virgin with a sad look, observes, inspects and takes notes for her report on this luxury establishment in which the most delicate refinement and the brutality of the back rooms, where prostitution “forbidden, but tolerated” can be sold discreetly by the pool.

As Emmanuelle begins an erotic adventure with Zelda, one of the young women who sell their bodies to the hotel’s wealthy clients, she becomes increasingly obsessed with the elusive Kei…

After adapting The Event by Annie Ernaux, Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, the director continues her work on the female body by tackling an iconic character from erotic cinema, which she treats in a total opposite way, revisiting the grammar of the genre.

The film opens with a first scene that shows a hackneyed scenario, which the director revisits by surreptitiously making it switch from sensuality to brutality, through the soundtrack and the devitalized expression on the young woman’s face while the man bangs her against the sink.

What is desire, what really arouses excitement? What are the power relations in erotic games? These are all questions that Audrey Diwan explores in this hypnotic film to the point of boredom.

It will take the wait to make desire happen, and also for Emmanuelle to escape from the stifling bubble of her luxury hotel, and more broadly for her to get out of the framework of her life, to go and rub shoulders, in Kei’s footsteps, with the air of the streets of Hong Kong, with the atmosphere of its bars and its back rooms. In short, with real life far from the deadly atmosphere of this large international hotel, to feel her own desire and fully enjoy her body, outside of pre-written scenarios.

This new version contrasts with the 1974 version also in the critical look at class relations, which are particularly violent in the context of this luxury hotel. Relations of power and domination that in erotic games can also become a powerful erotic engine.

Audrey Diwan films the female body and desire from very close up, in an internalized representation of her character, with extreme close-ups, blurred images, and above all an extremely worked and accurate sound, conceived as a major instrument of narration.

The director of The Event reappropriates a genre that does not usually convey a highly valued image of women, to make it a feminist and political film, in which she offers a free reflection on eroticism, purged of the clichés of the genre, and does not evade the question of power relations. In this work of inversion, Noémie Merlant cleverly plays with the codes of the genre to better reverse the message.

With an excessively careful and thought-out staging, ultra-aesthetic and refined, served by the magnetic presence of Noémie Merlant, whom she films magnificently, the director opens a door onto the intimate space, onto the mysterious universe that is desire.

Gender : Drama, erotic
Director: Audrey Diwan
Actors: Noémie Merlant, Will Sharpe, Naomi Watts
Country : France, United States
Duration : 1h47
Exit : September 25, 2024
Distributer : Pathé
Synopsis: Emmanuelle is in search of a lost pleasure. She flies alone to Hong Kong, for a business trip. In this sensual world city, she multiplies experiences and meets Kei, a man who never ceases to elude her.

Prohibited – 12 years old