Emmanuelle (1974)

          Thanks to the Sexual Revolution, hardcore porn enjoyed a brief moment of mainstream acceptability in the early ’70s, but enough moviegoers remained unwilling to patronize explicit cinema that a unique opportunity emerged for softcore flicks. (The success of 1972’s Last Tango in Paris, a X-rated “real” movie with simulated intimacy, helped make lurid movies fashionable.) Enter Emmanuelle, a lavishly photographed French movie that enjoyed 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 mainstream softcore. All of the genre’s now-familiar elements are present in the first Emmanuelle—gauzy cinematography, languid music that accelerates in tandem with onscreen intercourse, scandalous behavior ranging from exhibitionism 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 most softcore, however, Emmanuelle is boring and silly because of insipid dialogue, repetitive scenes, and vapid acting. Whether the movie actually provides erotic stimulation is a highly subjective matter, but helping viewers get their jollies is clearly the 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 given how the lead character’s “liberation” largely comprises acquiescence to humiliating encounters at the behest of men. Even the heroine’s least fraught encounter—a lesbian trysts—is filmed with a male gaze.
          Based on a French novel written by Emmanuelle Arsan, the movie depicts a fictional Frenchwoman named Emmanuelle, who travels to Thailand, where her husband is employed. Beginning on the plane trip to Bangkok (cue snickering laughter), Emmanuelle has a series of wild sexual experiences. Director Jaeckin, a top fashion photographer before he made Emmanuelle, handles the film’s images skillfully, so each composition is artful and delicate. Unfortunately, this sophisticated veneer masks enervated storytelling. Characters in Emmanuelle speak in pretentious fragments, and the story makes very little sense; instead of balancing carnal exploits with real-world concerns, the people in Emmanuelle act like they’re in some sort of erotic theme park. (Actual line: “Have you had sex since squash?”)
          Dutch model-turned-actress Sylvia Kristel became a minor international star by portraying Emmanuelle, but her work in this film hardly qualifies as a performance even 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. The Italian-made Black Emanuelle series (note the different spelling) is a knock-off franchise starring Laura Gemser, and a third Emmanuelle franchise was produced for ’90s TV with Krista Allen in the title role.

Emmanuelle: LAME