Review: Emmanuelle (2024)

Director:  Audrey Diwan

Stars:  Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe

For all it’s reputation as a soft core classic, Just Jaeckin’s (such an incredibly apt name) 1974 picture Emmanuelle isn’t all that, so is potentially ripe for a modern update. It’s easy to roll eyes at remakes, and often this is invited because the originals are classics. I’ve always thought that there was far more opportunity in taking a poorly conceived original and having a second go at making it work by making radical changes. To ‘do’ Emmanuelle in the 2020s would more or less require an update in the film’s philosophies. And the idea of the director of The Lost Highway Hotel’s Film of the Year 2022 – Audrey Diwan – remolding the material makes for a ripe and provocative proposition.

An admission. While Jaeckin’s original movie doesn’t stand much scrutiny, I’m a cautious fan of a number of its spin-offs, particularly from the Black Emanuelle cycle starring the inimitable Laura Gemser, as well as the cheesy bullshit churned out in the hilarious ’90s cycle Emmanuelle in Space with Krista Allen (7 direct-to-cable movies in 1994 alone!). The Gemser films – made largely in Italy and often by Joe D’Amato – represent the spurious series at it’s most artistically interesting. Brunello Rondi’s Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle might even be mistaken for a lost Pasolini. Still, even this purple patch is probably best described as an arthouse alternative to the James Bond films, presenting various jet-setting lifestyles albeit with sexual promiscuity in place of gadgets and espionage antics. Actually, with their assured, even dominant female lead, they amount to something of a feminist rejoinder to Bond (although that’s an admittedly compromised argument). 

So it’s hard to work out what to expect of Emmanuelle circa 2025, but I wasn’t expecting the character to be reimagined as a high-end mystery shopper. Noémie Merlant takes on the eponymous role, introduced in transit to Hong Kong, luring a fellow traveller into the mile high club with robotic aromanticism. Grading a luxury hotel at the behest of the management, Emmanuelle becomes involved with a couple she eavesdrops on at the hotel bar, reports sourly on the staff and generally exhibits a guarded, self-imposed sense of emotional exile from the world around her.

Diwan cranks up the ASMR elements of the film, ensuring we’re hyper-aware of every brush of cloth or scrape of glass. Engines drone and machines buzz, encasing her characters in the cocoons of machinery. In Diwan’s vision of the present, humanity often feels hemmed in by the artificial worlds we’ve crafted around us. Even a voyeuristic tryst indulged by fellow guest Zelda (Chacha Huang) takes place in a manmade arboretum; a synthesised biome nestled within the grounds. 

This sense of coldness and artificiality extends to the scenarios that play out in Rebecca Zlotowski and Diwan’s reimagining of the material, which is always detached and clinical, as though Emmanuelle’s sexually liberated encounters are part of an intellectual exercise she’s undertaking. Research for a thesis to be written at the end of it all. Composers Evgueni and Sacha Galperine over-score with shivering metallic strings that most openly recall Jed Kurzel’s work on Alien: Covenant. Eroticism has very little to do with it. Unless, of course, you’re driven wild by the privileged lonesomeness of the workaholic 1%.

Diwan is a talented filmmaker though, and Emmanuelle looks and moves as gorgeously as one might expect. Laurent Tangy’s cinematography is sinuous as it navigates the zigzagging corridors of the hotel. Production designer Katia Wyszkop ensures that the hotel interiors are interminably, oppressively tasteful. The craft is as coolly aloof and as clockwork as Emmanuelle’s sexual adventures. There’s no air or moisture about it, no sweat or spunk. This is an erotic film reconceptualised as a schematic or driver’s manual. Reduced to a set of stage directions. 

All head and no heart, Emmanuelle might best be appreciated as a more vanilla cousin to David Cronenberg’s Crash, dispassionately examining our engagement with sex and arousal without becoming a part of it. This is summed up most frequently in Merlant’s deliberately inexpressive face. She looks flatly bored even when masturbating in tandem with Zelda. Emmanuelle’s interest in ‘FIT’ engineer Kei (Will Sharpe) runs counter to her ambivalence elsewhere in the picture, making their interactions feel almost contrived. A lengthy excursion off of the hotel grounds together feels like a narrative amble off course, and their matter-of-fact sex talk is defined by its precision rather than any conjured desire. Diwan’s film feels like an autopsy of Emmanuelle as opposed to a reimagining. Icily neutralised. This glacial asexuality has an appeal all of it’s own, ironically playing as though we were being studied by an alien civilisation ala the Emmanuelle in Space series. 

If it’s raunchiness or horniness you’re after, there are far more obliging alternatives to discover in the storied history of erotic cinema. For a flatly analytical approach that almost borders on the dreamy because of its hypnotic disengagement, this is a decidedly unsexy curio. A film likely to find itself misunderstood.