Emmanuelle
“Emmanuelle” is the godmother, one could say, of Skinimax soft core pornography. This adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel is explicit but not graphic, and the structure is ground zero for things like “Red Shoe Diaries,” where private desires are laid bare. This film also has dated awfully; Just Jaekin’s movie is about female exploring erotic pleasures, but almost entirely at the result of other people projecting their desires on Emmanuelle. Female sexual empowerment? To a point, but not enough to buck the trend of most erotic cinema. If anything, it started a lot of bad habits.
Sylvia Krystel stars as Emmanuelle, the nubile, sensual wife of Jean (Daniel Sarky). Jean has been in Thailand on business, and Emmanuelle is joining him. They have been apart for a while, and Jean has boasted about Emmanuelle’s sexuality to everyone, understanding that she takes lovers, even boasting. When she arrives, a new chapter in their marriage will begin.
Taken in the perspective of the 1970s, I can imagine this feeling more progressive sexually than it is now, but even then, there are limits to what Jaekin (best known for his soft core erotica) and his writer, Jean-Louis Richard, are able to bring to this material. Almost immediately, Krystel is at least partially naked, and almost everyone reacts to her sexually, whether she’s doing anything particularly sensual or not. Looking at it now, for the first time in well over a decade, one of the things I was most interested in was how “Emmanuelle” looks at the dynamic of a woman who is free with her body, and a husband who wants to control her desires more than allow her the agency to fulfill them herself. Almost every sexual interaction Emmanuelle has is either set up by Jean, or has someone acting on their image of her as a sexual being, whether it’s a precocious young woman (Christine Boisson), passengers on her flight to Thailand, one of the women in her husband’s circle (Jeanne Colletin), or an older man (Alain Cuny) who wants to expand Emmanuelle’s erotic vocabulary. The only time where Emmanuelle seems to have any real agency in her sexual adventures is with Bee (Marika Green), a woman just outside of her husband’s group of friends. When she goes away with Bee for a couple of days, the jealousy her husband claims not to have comes out, but so does the feeling that not all sex is free from messy emotions for Emmanuelle. Sometimes, what we pursue for ourselves will hurt us. This stretch of the film actually has something genuine to say.
Questionable sexual politics aside, Jaekin does understand how to do soft-core erotica very well. Most of the sexual encounters of this film are teasing and erotic even as the story is downright lunacy. (The scene where Jean, in his jealousy, goes out, and sees a naked woman light a cigarette in her vagina is madness and, honestly, a disgustingly unnecessary addition to the film.) Where he- and the film- lose the plot is at the end, when the older man- Mario- takes Emmanuelle to a brothel to push her boundaries of desire, and forces her into situations where she is raped in view of the public. This is where the male perspective the film is made with lost me, because it’s a gross objectification of sexual assault as a source of pleasure. Pushing our own boundaries is one thing- feeling like humiliating a person to do so is abuse. The film trying to frame it as an empowering moment is sick, and it ends the film on a sour note that, almost five decades later, taints an iconic film, and turns what could have been a fun exercise in cinematic sensuality into a disturbing template for Hollywood’s worst tendencies when it comes to portraying sexuality.
