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

The Story of O (1975)

          The 1954 French novel Histoire d’O, written by Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage, is notorious because some admirers regard it as an erotic exploration of what later came to be known as BDSM (bondage, domination, sadism, masochism), while others disdain it as a vile exercise in sexual objectification. It’s unsurprising that a movie version emerged in the ’70s, when changing social mores allowed for mainstream distribution of films with previously taboo content, and it’s unsurprising that the movie version prioritizes sex over psychology. Corinne Cléry stars as “O,” a Parisian photographer who proves her love for René (Udo Kier) by agreeing to become a sex slave for a group of men living at a country estate; the story then explores how the couple’s relationship changes when René “gives” O to another man, Sir Stephen (Anthony Steel). The film’s director, Frenchman Just Jaekin, previously scored at the box office with another libidinous literary adaptation, Emmanuelle (1974), and he takes a similar approach to The Story of O, combining acres of female nudity with evocative locations, glamorous photography, and insinuating washes of Vangelis-lite synthesizer music.

          The film’s fetishism of the female form and the cast of emotionally blank actors belie the posh presentation, however, revealing that Jaekin’s movie is nothing but soft-core porn with artistic pretentions. The film’s third-person voiceover does most of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining the plot, while also providing lurid commentary like “O wondered why she found her terror so delicious.” In addition to lacking substance, The Story of O flops as erotica, because the innumerable vignettes of men and women fondling, groping, mounting, and whipping Cléry quickly become tiresome. The abuse scenes are unpleasant (especially the branding bit—ouch!), and the movie is so cold that it’s impossible to get caught up in O’s journey. It doesn’t help that most of the dialogue sounds like it was either dubbed or looped. Cléry, who later appeared as a Bond girl in Moonraker (1979), is very beautiful, very naked, and very patient with the people who paw at her privates throughout the film, but even her charms fail to sustain interest once the movie devolves into tedium.

The Story of O: LAME