On Wednesday, September 25, the new version of a classic from the erotic cinema of the 1970s, Emmanuelle, will be released. In 1974, the film directed by Just Jaeckin attracted nine million viewers in France and nearly 50 million worldwide. It remained in theaters for ten years in a cinema in Paris, where tourists came to see the film.
The story told how the wife of a diplomat discovered the joys of exotic sex while joining her husband in Bangkok. The actress, Sylvia Kristel, became a star and went on to star in a series of sequels. Fifty years later, the film by Audrey Diwan has little in common with the original.
The director returned to the original book, published in 1959 by Emmanuelle Arsan, which became a pre-feminist phenomenon before May 1968. The 1974 film portrayed Emmanuelle as an object of pleasure offered to men. In the new film, she is portrayed as an independent young woman working in luxury hospitality who decides to search for a sexual pleasure she is unable to feel.
“My project was to make a clean break with the past,” said Audrey Diwan, the director. In 2024, Noémie Merlant embodies the new Emmanuelle. Since the first film in 1974, eroticism has given way to pornography accessible to all.
The Emmanuelle of 2024 is a post-#MeToo film that does not offer thrills. The overall tone is sometimes a bit cerebral and keeps the viewer at a distance. Audrey Diwan delivers a film with a troubling aesthetic, supported by an impressive actress, with a necessary discourse on this territory often unexplored by men: female pleasure.
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