Eyebrows were raised when Audrey Diwan, writer-director of Happening, announced that she would follow her powerful, Golden Lion-winning abortion drama with an adaptation of Emmanuelle, the saucy 1970s soft-porn sensation.
The casting of Noémie Merlant, the Portrait of a Lady on Fire star, hinted at a hip, feminist reworking of Emmanuelle Arsan’s original novel. Nope. The finished product is a dull, decidedly unerotic hotel stay. Merlant moaned more convincingly and ecstatically when she fell in love with a fairground ride in Jumbo. Indeed, her Emmanuelle never appears to have anything like a good time.
Sylvia Kristel’s iconic portrayal of the polyamorous heroine was a bored and glamorous hausfrau. Diwan, working from a script she wrote with Rebecca Zlotowski, re-creates Emmanuelle as a quality-control inspector prowling around a ritzy Hong Kong hotel. From the get-go the antics that impressed audiences during the sexual revolution – oh, look: she’s joined the mile-high club – were already dated by the time Carry on Emmanuelle opened, in 1978. Now they feel like the peccadilloes of a lost Neolithic tribe.
Most of the plot leads to a lopsided threesome with another couple, some shenanigans with a local prostitute, Zelda (Chacha Huang), and Emmanuelle stalking the mysterious and unavailable asexual Kei (The White Lotus’s Will Sharpe). The security chief (Anthony Wong) and Naomi Watts (playing the hotel manager whom Emmanuelle is supposed to sack) watch as various parties skulk off to outhouses like smoking schoolchildren.
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The plush furnishings of Hong Kong’s St Regis hotel prove sexier than the uninspired couplings on screen. The unstimulated viewer is more likely to perk up at the sight of the cushions: bow chicka wow wow – would you look at the size of that couch?
Laurent Tangy’s slick cinematography adds to the sense that we’re watching a luxe commercial. But for what? It’s impossible to figure out who this empty film is for or why it exists in the first place. Come back, Emmanuelle in Space: all is forgiven.
