Emmanuelle (1974)
Directed by Just Jaeckin

Film Review

Although it now appears tired and dated, when it was released in the mid 1970s, Emmanuelle was something of a cinematic revolution - the first soft core porn film to achieve major box office success. When the French government failed to have the film banned, it became an overnight success in France, attracting a record-breaking nine million spectators.  It was no less successful abroad, particularly in the United States, where it was marketed as an art-house movie.   The film was followed by what seems like an interminable series of sequels and spin-offs (of ever-decreasing quality) and is considered by some a masterpiece of erotic cinema, by others a useless pile of tat. It also inspired the worst of the Carry On films, Carry on Emmannuelle (1978).

The film is based on the controversial auto-biographical novel by Emmanuelle Arsan.  The character of Emmanuelle is played by Sylvia Kristel who, despite her limited acting ability, appears to suit her role surprisingly well.  (In some of her subsequent films, notably Claude Chabrol's Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977), Kristel showed that she could act, given the right material.) The film's main selling point is the evocative cinematography, which captures the beauty of the Thailand location and uses this very effectively to support the other (more predictable) erotic images.   Francis Lai's score, including the catchy Emmanuelle theme sung by Pierre Bachelet, also adds to the film's charm.

So much for the film's good points. Despite some memorable sequences (the affair between Emmanuelle and her female lover Bee is beautifully filmed), the film takes itself far too seriously and quickly becomes tedious and repetitive.   Director Just Jaeckin is renowned for bringing an unusual artistic flair to erotic cinema, but his approach is too deliberately exploitative to be taken seriously.  It is too evident that film's main raison d'être is to serve as a piece of soft core pornography, and so characterisation and plot are subjugated to that end.

Having failed to sustain a coherent narrative for more than an hour, the film quickly degenerates into a contrived mishmash of ideas which allow attractive young women to flaunt their bits in front of (presumably) an all-male cinema audience.   The dialogue in the last twenty minutes of the film would be hilarious if it were not so gut-wrenchingly pretentious and totally devoid of meaning.  At this point, the screenwriter gave up and presumably started hitting keys on the typewriter at random.

If naughty soft focus 1970s porn is the kind of thing that turns you on, Emmanuelle is a must-see film, a classic of its genre and, historically, an important film.   For those higher up on the evolutionary scale, watching paint dry or counting grains of sand on the beach would probably be a more fulfilling way to pass the time.

Film Synopsis

Emmanuelle, the young wife of a diplomat, arrives in Bangkok to visit her husband.  She is immediately pressurised by her new entourage to show a more liberal attitude towards sex.  Her husband is apparently keen that she uses the opportunity to pursue extramarital affairs, so she begins by having a lesbian relationship with a female archaeologist, Bee.  When that leads nowhere, Emmanuelle is placed in the care of sex guru Mario, who takes it upon himself to explain to her the meaning of eroticism...