'Extremely problematic': How cult 'art house erotica' film Emmanuelle became a global hit - and dated badly

To mark the 50th anniversary of the erotic French film that made soft porn mainstream cinema, it's had a 21st Century reboot – but will it match the success of the original?

A new version of Emmanuelle, this time in English and starring France's Noémie Merlant, has just been released in France. This Emmanuelle, directed by Audrey Diwan, a Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner for her powerful abortion drama Happening, explores female sexuality, 2024-style.

If Emmanuelle's sexual adventures need re-telling, that might be because the 1974 original seems so dated now. Directed by Frenchman Just Jaeckin and starring Dutch actor Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle, the film (based on a 1967 novel of the same name) follows the 19-year-old wife of a French diplomat on a visit to Thailand. All the residents, whether Thai or expat, seem ready for sex at any time. Shot in soft, dream-like focus, Emmanuelle has encounters with men and women in a variety of locations, including joining the mile-high club, although not all these experiences are consensual. She is raped in an opium den but then swiftly goes on to have sex with a man who has "won" her during a fight. "I can't say it's a brilliant film, really," Sylvia Kristel would say of it, in an interview with The Telegraph in 2007.

Many critics at the time agreed with her, but the movie was a box-office sensation, selling nearly nine million tickets in France alone, although it was initially banned until a new government was elected in 1974. It was a hit, too, in the US, much of Europe, and in Japan. Several sequels and spin-offs followed in the 1970s, and Kristel starred in a few of them. "The film," she said, "became like a monument in Paris. The Japanese [tourists] were stuffed in the bus and then they were taken to the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Emmanuelle." One cinema, the Triomphe on the Champs-Élysées, would show the film continuously until 1986.

Why a soft porn movie would become another French landmark is down to timing, according to Eve Jackson, culture editor and presenter of Arts 24 on the news channel France 24. "It was the first film of its kind in French, and one of the first French films to become a global phenomenon," she tells the BBC. "It also came at a time when the themes of the era were 'free love' and sexual liberation. The contraceptive pill was widely available, and a year later abortion was made legal in France.

"Last Tango in Paris, which also has explicit sex scenes, had been a hit in France two years before, but then I believe double the amount of people went to see Emmanuelle during its first week. It broke taboos, showing masturbation, having multiple sexual partners, having sex with anonymous people, but at the same time was mainstream because the size of the audiences showed there was desire for this kind of film. It opened a conversation of how sexuality could be shown in cinema. It's far from being a masterpiece, but it became a cult hit and the film poster itself was iconic. It could be seen all over Paris in the 1970s."

In the US, Emmanuelle was marketed as a "classier" kind of porn film to watch – as art house erotica – with the tagline "X was never like this" separating it from other adult films with an X-rating. It was also perceived by some fans, particularly in Japan, as a feminist movie, according to Kristel: "They thought Emmanuelle was dominant, just because of this one scene where she climbs on top of her husband. That was the moment when all the Japanese women stood up and applauded."

Many would agree now, though, that the film has not stood the test of time, from its depiction of Thai people as anonymous servants, fighters and rapists, to the issue of sexual consent. Jackson describes the original movie as "extremely problematic".

"The character is a sexual object, most of her partners are dominant older men who are orchestrating her pleasure for themselves," she says. "There are moments, not just for Emmanuelle, where the consent isn't obvious. Near the end of the film, there's a horrific group rape scene."

"Sexual consent is such a hot topic in France right now, not just because of the #MeToo movement," continues Jackson. "We have the Gisèle Pelicot rape trial going on, making worldwide headlines. So Emmanuelle seems wrong on so many levels. Back in 1974, she may have been seen as a trailblazer for an era of free love and sexual adventure, and given France a reputation for it, but the film wasn't feminist. It was written and directed by men."

Over time, the Emmanuelle phenomenon faded even in France, and few younger people saw the original: at the world premiere of the new film, Noémie Merlant confessed that she hadn't seen the 1974 version before she took on the role.

But there's still been intense interest that a French female director would turn her gaze on the subject matter, even if Audrey Diwan's version had a poor critical reaction at its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival last week. Merlant's Emmanuelle is in her 30s, and takes a trip to Hong Kong to inspect a luxury hotel, where Naomi Watts plays the manager. During the visit, Emmanuelle rediscovers her own desire and pleasure in life, through encounters with a Wuthering Heights-reading escort (Chacha Huang) as well as an engineer played by The White Lotus's Will Sharpe.

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Contemporary audiences, who have matured with erotica so mainstream that it's not considered outrageous (even Fifty Shades of Grey is nearly 15 years old) and who can access porn on their mobile phones, present a different directorial challenge to those of 1974, and Diwan suggested in a recent interview with Variety that implying rather than showing sexual tension was important to her.

"Back in the 70s, the desire was to show more, which is what made the first film so successful," she said. "Except, I felt what stayed hidden was more interesting. I thought to push that tension by asking the viewer to engage actively with the film and to collaborate with the story."

According to some reviewers, it hasn't worked. Variety writes: "Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honouring the film's defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief: Audrey Diwan's inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither."

In France, reviews have been mixed. "The staging is brilliant, polished, and deliberately cold," writes French daily Le Figaro. "It shines but remains cold… Obviously, the goal was to transform Emmanuelle into a feminist icon. Funny idea." But the French Huffington Post is more positive about the film's objectives, writing: "Emmanuelle is no longer the target of all desires, the hypersexualised woman-object. She is an active subject. The object of her own desire precisely."

There's also been disappointment that the new film isn't in French, when the last one succeeded globally in that language. But Eve Jackson still believes French viewers will be watching it "out of interest".

"It's got an internationally well-known cast, Audrey Diwan is a respected film-maker, and I think everyone is curious to know, 'can this female director supplant the male gaze on this iconic female character Emmanuelle?'" she says. "I'm not sure. I still think because it's an erotic film and it's got that iconic title, that in France, the name alone has 50 years of history as an erotic sex symbol – for men."

Emmanuelle (2024) is on release now in France. It will be released globally at a later date.

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