‘Emmanuelle’ Review: Audrey Diwan’s Softcore Remake

A snigger-trigger from the moment its first trailer dropped, erotic drama Emmanuelle is more or less the embarrassing exercise in pointless revisionist filmmaking most were expecting it to be. It’s a work that’s all too easy to write off as another example of that very 21st century phenomenon, the relaunch of a campy mid-20th century brand but with more pretension, moodier lighting and an entirely fatal absence of humor.

In this case, the original property was a book turned softcore porn film (the tome by Emmanuelle Arsan, the picture directed by Just Jaeckin and starring Sylvia Kristel), which became a massive crossover hit in 1974, racked up mountains of receipts at mainstream theaters, contributed for good or ill to the discourse around the so-called “sexual revolution” of the time and taught millions how to convert regular jeans into cutoff shorts.

Director Audrey Diwan‘s follow-up to her rightly acclaimed, Venice Golden Lion-winning abortion story Happening is unlikely to have that kind of cultural impact (not even in sartorial terms, although Emmanuelle‘s deployment of ’90s-revival bias-cut slip dresses is right on trend). In its defense, there is something admirable about its attempt to put female subjectivity and agency in the driver’s seat this time, even if that’s to create something that’s already a bit of a 21st century cliché: a sex-positive girlboss story.

As such, there’s definitely an audience out there for it, and not just one comprised of viewers who will watch it through the lens of bitchy derision, fun though that will be. If it’s lucky, Emmanuelle might find an afterlife as a kind of Showgirls for its generation, a great-bad movie that’s undeniably craptacular yet strangely endearing, a shameful pleasure in every sense.

Diwan and co-screenwriter Rebecca Zlotowski’s screenplay takes just the barest bones from the original for inspiration. That said, both films sound like they were originally written in certain kind of pretentious but plausible French which then lost all verisimilitude when translated to English. Anyway, where Kristel’s Emmanuelle was a largely passive, barely employed model whose life revolved around her sinister, Bangkok-based diplomat husband and his desires, the new and improved Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) is a quality control inspector for a large luxury hotel chain, so a career woman in her own right.

After we first meet her having anhedonic mile-high toilet sex in business class with a total stranger (Harrison Arevalo) — a nod to a notorious scene in the first movie — she lands at the Rosefield Palace, a five-or-more-star Hong Kong establishment she’s there to assess. (Credits and press notes indicate the hotel is a mash-up of location work at the St. Regis Hong Kong and constructed sets to represent the lush suites with their kilometer-long sofas.)

As Emmanuelle gets down to the business of timing how long it takes staff to bring her a glass of water and judging the presentation of a chef’s take on lobster with a mango reduction, the feature goes into a montage mode that, more than anything else, resembles fashion films and other kinds of covert advertising aimed at the luxe end of the consumer market. There are lots of pretty shots of drawn freestanding baths and trays of petits fours being adjusted in their cold shelves. It’s all much of a muchness.

The actual plot involves Emmanuelle having a threesome with another couple (“enjoying” hardly seems the right word since she pointedly never has an orgasm); semi-stalking a tall dark stranger, Kei Shinohara (Will Sharpe, The White Lotus), who was also on the plane in the opening scene; and palling around with local escort Zelda (Chacha Huang), who plies her trade from the hotel’s pool and insists she does sex work because she likes it as a break from working on her degree in English Lit.

In addition, there’s a thick strand of plot wrapped around Emmanuelle trying to find an excuse for the corporation to fire expensive hotel manager Margot (Naomi Watts, doing her native British accent for a change), even though the older woman seems to perform her job impeccably. There’s a little overlap between the Margot and Zelda storylines in that the former seems to be well aware of what the latter is up to on her establishment’s grounds — not hard to guess given that the security chief (Anthony Wong) scrutinizes everyone’s tiniest move with CCTV. But like the annoyingly inchoate flirtation with Kei, this feels deeply underwritten, or like the victim of edit-suite triage.

In the end, the film has only one dramatic goal, and that’s watching Emmanuelle finally get herself off with another hunky stranger while asexual Kei watches and translates instructions to the lover for her into Cantonese, because taking control seems to be the emotional apex of any contemporary erotic story.

In the press notes, Diwan talks a good game about drawing inspiration from Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Lodge Kerrigan’s Claire Dolan among other titles. To her credit, Emmanuelle does feel closer to those nuanced studies of sex work and the intricacies 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 say anything more complicated than, “hello” or (while having sex) “faster,” then it’s quite pleasant, even — dare we say it — sexy to watch.

The sometimes discordant but always rhythmic and appropriately pulsing soundtrack, by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, casts a strong spell, along with Laurent Tangy’s sensual cinematography. It’s just that it all seems in service of making a classy looking ad for a product you could neither ever afford, want nor need.