Emmanuelle

In theory, a modern, feminist or at least feminine update of a cult softcore classic by an award-winning filmmaker does not necessarily sound like a bad idea. But theory is one thing, while practice can be something entirely else, even if the filmmaker has a clear vision of what she is doing. In the case of Audrey Diwan and her reading of Emmanuelle, which premiered as the San Sebastian opener and now struggles to get bookings on the festival circuit, it seems that she and her co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski did not have the vaguest idea. We were lucky or unlucky enough to catch the film at the late screening at Zagreb Film Festival.

For those who were born too late or are completely uninterested in the history of porn, let us quickly recap the phenomenon of Emmanuelle. It started with a 1967 erotic novel by Emmanuelle Arsan that quickly spawned the softcore film version directed by Just Jaeckin. The 1974 incarnation quickly became a phenomenon as an erotic movie that dealt with the female perception of sexuality and empowered it in an otherwise men-dominated industry, and as one of the last tales of the 1960s sexual revolution. After its success, it led to a series of films that inspired many more series of movies all over the world. The whole Emmanuelle craze lasted for decades, switching formats and preoccupations.

The two smartest things about Diwan’s reading of it are given in the first couple of scenes. She opens it in the plane with a nod to Jaeckin’s original, as Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) looks for a partner for the “mile-high” adventure. She finds one and they have an efficient, wordless, no-foreplay “quickie” in the toilet, but going back to her seat, her gaze locks with a fellow business class passenger who will, we sense, become an important character in the story. With the opening scene, Diwan notifies us that she is at least familiar with the original material and that she even has some respect for it.

The second smart thing comes with the realisation that our Emmanuelle is not a passive, bored wife of an international diplomat or UN-employed engineer, but a single woman with a lucrative career of her own. Namely, she is a quality control inspector who visits the 5+ star hotels, trying to find faults in their way of catering to exclusive clientele. This time, the trip takes her to Hong Kong to visit a fine establishment that has fallen down the list of the most desired places in the world leading the chain management to suspect something must be wrong with the way the hotel manager Margot Parson (Naomi Watts) does her job.

However, it seems that Emmanuelle is more interested in having a good time in a threesome with a power couple, masturbating together with an escort Zelda (Chacha Huang) who poses as a literature student or chasing her mystery man Kei Shinohara (Will Sharpe) with the help of the hotel’s surveillance officer (Anthony Wong). That brings us to the spirit of the film, which is appropriately trashy, complete with nonsensical dialogue and robotic, slightly “off” line delivery, along the lines of the porn movies. The climax arrives late (as expected), but itself cannot save the film from its cardinal fault.

The problem is that the new Emmanuelle is as completely unsexy, cold and sterile as the environment the titular protagonist inhabits. She becomes an integral part of it – frigid, aseptic, as decorative as a vase or as a modernist sculpture, no matter whether she wears an elegant dress or she is completely stripped out of it, but also seemingly with just as much emotion or drive. Envisioned as a character who searches for faults only not to find any for her telegraphic reports she records on her cellphone, Emmanuelle looks absent, with her gaze getting lost somewhere in the distance. Simply put, we do not buy her as a woman on a course of sexual exploration, a woman who enjoys anything or is driven by anything rather than her own boredom and artificial script mechanics.

Merlant carries only a minor share of fault for her detached interpretation of the titular protagonist, in that she does not listen to her acting instincts. The trouble is that Diwan, who did a great job converting Annie Ernaux’s classic feminist memoir into the contemporary cinema feminist masterpiece, Happening, does not resonate with the sex-positive approach material like Emmanuelle needs to function. Working from a script that also contains some genuinely WTF moments, including the quotes from the first couple of pages of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for no reason, and which even mistakes the libido-blocking narrative of the natural disasters and the end of the world for something profoundly seductive - all of it seemingly translated (possibly even with the help of artificial intelligence) into some sort of English language - Diwan seems just lost.

The viewers can only feel puzzled by what they see, as they question why anyone would greenlight such an idea. Acting powerhouse Watts seems wasted in a bland role and even the trashy flavour from time to time seems like a lucky strike, while nudity seems misplaced and spent on mundane scenes with no point. In the end, there are only unflattering parallels to be drawn between the film, the protagonist and the environment, and nothing of it is sexy, genuine or humane.