Once the Sexual Revolution was in full swing (pun
intended), hardcore porn enjoyed a brief moment of mainstream acceptability,
with skin flicks including Deep Throat
(1972) becoming part of the national conversation. Yet plenty of moviegoers
remained unwilling to patronize full-on porn, thereby creating a market
opportunity for purveyors of softcore pictures. (The success of 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, a “real” movie
starring Marlon Brando that carried an X-rating even though it did not include
explicit content, also helped make sex-themed movies fashionable.) Enter Emmanuelle, a lavishly photographed
French movie that enjoyed phenomenal box-office success worldwide and kicked
off a seemingly immortal franchise. As of this writing, something like 70 Emmanuelle movies have been made,
including official films and knock-offs.
Moreover, Emmanuelle set the template for the hundreds, if not thousands, of
softcore films that followed in its wake. All of the genre’s now-familiar
elements are present in the first Emmanuelle—gauzy
cinematography, languid music that speeds up in tandem with onscreen
characters’ sexual excitement, scandalous behavior ranging from exhibitionism
to group sex to sadomasochism, and so on. It’s as if producer Yves
Rouseet-Rouard, writer Jean-Louis Richard, and director Just Jaeckin set out to
make a training film for softcore entrepreneurs. As is true of nearly every
subsequent softcore flick, however, Emmanuelle
is boring and silly, thanks to insipid dialogue, repetitive scenes, and vapid
acting. Whether the movie actually provides erotic stimulation is a highly
subjective matter, but it’s clear that helping viewers get their jollies is the
film’s sole raison d’être. After all,
it’s hard to take the picture seriously as a political statement about people
unmooring themselves from old-fashioned social restrictions, because the lead
character’s “liberation” largely comprises acquiescence to a series of
humiliating encounters in order to please the men in her life. Even the
heroine’s least fraught sexual relationship—her lesbian affair with a friend—is
filmed with a male gaze.
Emmanuelle
was based on a French novel written by Emmanuelle Arsan. The story depicts a
fictional Frenchwoman named Emmanuelle, who travels to Thailand, where her
husband is employed. Beginning on the plane trip from Paris to Bangkok (cue
snickering laughter) and continuing after her arrival in the Far East,
Emmanuelle has a series of wild sexual encounters. Eventually, she leaves her
husband for another man, and her breadth of carnal knowledge expands to
include—well, just about everything, actually. Director Jaeckin, a top fashion
photographer before he made Emmanuelle,
handles the film’s images beautifully, so each composition is artful and
delicate. Unfortunately, this sophisticated veneer hides enervated
storytelling. Characters in Emmanuelle
speak in cryptic and/or pretentious fragments, and the story makes very little
sense; instead of balancing their sexual exploits with such real-world concerns
as jobs and money, the people in Emmanuelle
act like they’re in some sort of erotic theme park. (At one point, Emmanuelle’s
female lover asks the heroine about her activities since their last tryst:
“Have you had sex since squash?” As if spending time any other was is unimaginable.)
Dutch model-turned-actress Sylvia Kristel became a sex symbol and a minor
international star by portraying Emmanuelle, but her work in this film hardly
qualifies as a performance—though she simulates sexual delight with gusto. The way the filmmakers objectify Kristel is just one of many
distasteful aspects of Emmanuelle,
because the picture also portrays Thais as primitives driven solely by animal
instincts. Ultimately, Emmanuelle is
significant because of how many imitators and sequels came afterward, but
it’s negligible as cinema. FYI, Kristel appeared intermittently in Emmanuelle sequels until 1992’s Emmanuelle 7, the last “official” movie.
Additionally, the Italian-made Black
Emanuelle series (note the different spelling) is a knock-off franchise
starring Laura Gemser, and therefore unrelated to the Kristel pictures.
Emmanuelle:
LAME
2 comments:
Growing up in the '80s with the advent of late-night softcore flicks on cable, Sylvia Kristel was a goddess! But I have to agree with your assessment since revisiting EMMANUELLE as an adult (I have the 3-film box set!). It is indeed all "male gaze" stuff.
SNL did a decent parody recently (which I imagine went over the heads of many younger viewers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afF1BD4iems
Saw that SNL sketch when it aired -- and it does indeed capture the vapidity of bad Euro softcore, since so many of those movies seem as if they were made up as filming went along...
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