Review: Emmanuelle (or, How to Make a French Softcore Drama Super Boring)

Seriously, how do you screw this up?!

For decades, Emmanuelle was the first name in erotic thrills. Based on the 1959 novel by Emmanuelle Arsan (real name Marayat Rollet-Andriane), the various films of this tale of sexual awakening inspired shock, satisfaction, and a fair few parodies. Plans for a reboot had been in the works for a while, but the trickiness of modernizing a very second-wave and male gaze-y narrative for the 21st-century proved to be understandably fraught. When Audrey Diwan, director of the Golden Lion-winning abortion drama Happening, was approached to helm the reboot, she said she had no familiarity with Emmanuelle in any of its forms. But a stridently feminist filmmaker taking on the ultimate figure of sexual freedom felt like an intriguing fit. It's a shame the actual movie is so arid and anticlimactic.

Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) is introduced to us as she enters the mile high club on a luxury flight to Hong Kong, an experience that proves to be altogether unsatisfying for her. She's a quality controller for a luxury hotel brand, summoned to an obscenely fancy seven-star establishment in the region. Her real goal is to find fault with Margot (Naomi Watts), the manager who the company wants rid of. They just need a good reason to sack her. For Emmanuelle, Hong Kong is a chance to get away from herself and perhaps find something more pleasurable than a quickie against an airplane sink.

It just seems plain wrong that a film about sex and desire spends more of its time talking about luxury hotel management than f*cking. Diwan’s camera is so focused on the ins and outs of this admittedly impressive place, one entirely outside of my pleb budget, and there are moments of joy to be found in mindless FOMO indulgence. Certainly, it’s shot with more warmth than much of Emmanuelle’s sexual experiences. Granted, her first couple of moments, including a vanilla threesome with a random couple, are meant to look rather basic and unproductive to her and the audience. But that tone continues in scenes where she’s supposed to be discovering something about herself.

There are hints of something more powerful in one scene where she mutually masturbates alongside Zelda (Chacha Huang), a local woman who works as an escort on the hotel grounds. Zelda enjoys the possibilities of voyeurism and does the job because she enjoys it. She wants Emmanuelle to open up but she struggles to do so, even amid the experience of self-pleasure. But it goes nowhere, and poor Huang is saddled with so much weird expository dialogue about Wuthering Heights of all things that it quickly reveals how the director and writer (Rebecca Zlotowski) have no idea what to do with her.

That ends up being a running theme throughout Emmanuelle. Things happen but feel pointless and they're not even hot. Jamie Campbell Bower turns up to play some English dude who contributes nothing to the story. I wonder if there's a cut of the film where he was even slightly more crucial to the text. He's the actor who comes closest to making this terrible dry dialogue work, mostly because he's got a juicy English accent and seems aware of how absurd what he's been given to say is. You wish he'd camp it up a bit more, if only to bring some verve to the rest of the picture. Watts, one of our most wasted actresses, gets a bizarre monologue about hotel management that is positioned as something important but makes no impact in a story with so few true stakes.

(Image via Neon.)

Emmanuelle becomes obsessed with Kei (Will Sharpe), a mysterious client who is a regular at the hotel but never stays in his room. He's enigmatic, extremely sexy, and also kind of pointless. We're supposed to buy that this beautiful, accomplished, and savvy woman would come close to throwing herself at this dude's feet solely because he's mysterious. I suppose when there's so little going on in the rest of the movie, you cling to what you've got. At least he and Merlant look good together (and Merlant gets to wear an array of gorgeous backless dresses), but their chemistry isn’t believable. Really, there’s not much chemistry in Emmanuelle, full stop. That’s a crime.

It’s not necessarily outdated to make this concept in 2024, although there is certainly something discomfiting about a modern drama about a white woman going to Hong Kong for her exoticized pleasure. This Emmanuelle feels so shockingly timid that it’s as though it’s playing with the sexual politics of several decades prior. It didn’t need to be all whips and chains but it is weird how little pleasure the film has in finding its lead’s, well, pleasure. I couldn’t help but think of Babygirl while watching this, a film that does all of this far better and finds a way to make a woman’s self-discovery unexpected, funny, awkward, sexy, and real. There is one scene where things do truly hot up, but it’s right before the film finishes and by then it was just too late to win me back.

I wonder what Diwan and Zlotowski were aiming for with their Emmanuelle. Did they want something modern but demure to avoid accusations of making cheesecake softcore? There are certainly glimmers of ideas here, largely about the intrinsically transactional nature of sex and romance, and how there is liberation to be found in embracing something for its own sake. You just have to wade through almost two hours of hotel reviews to get to it. check out Babygirl instead.

Emmanuelle was released in France in September of this year. It does not currently have a US release date.