Recently, I found a new interest in a kind of movies I thought was locked in the most obscure basements of my memories, belonging to a time where Internet didn't reign, nor pornography, but that's saying the same. Those were erotic movies, they didn't show much but what they hid was enough to arouse our beginning masculine senses, the female body was a total mystery for most of us and these movies handled it with the delicacy of a precious and thoughtful gift that had to preserve some of its mystery.
And I learned to be part of that show-a-little-and-enjoy-a-lot little game and appreciate the silly magic of these mindless stories set in ridiculously grandiose places, where love scenes were choreographed in slow motion under the smooth sound of a saxophone, allowing butlers or maids to break their routine through a session of window shopping. The love scenes could take place on the canopy of some Henry VIII room, in the vicinity of a vast swimming pool or under a chestnut tree not too far from the vineyard, the setting counted.
When the same thing happened over and over, the softcore film had to delight the eyes on another level than eroticism, if you don't admire nature of furniture at some point, something is missing. And it's not that "Emmanuelle" is a great erotic film because it set all these patterns but it's a classic because its French 'new look' treated a minor genre as if it was a major one.And "Emmanuelle" has everything: the candid heroin with an unexplainable thirst for sexual discovery, boredom and ennui making sex the only possible palliative, the exotic luxuriant setting adding to the luxurious places and a sweet little tone that poetically captures the spirit of the heroine if you have the chance to understand French.
There's something about the way the film looks, the way it sounds and the way director Just Jaeckin elevate it as close to a character study as an erotic film can get and whether its take on eroticism should make us laugh or cringe or think, it does, there comes a point where you cease to look at it as "just an erotic film". And it has to do with the the magnetic and enigmatic performance of Sylvia Kristel (who sadly left us in 2012), Emmanuelle is a young woman married to a French diplomat based in Bangkok. The husband is an enthusiast of free love and allows Emmanuelle to have other encounters. Despite her free-pass, Emmanuelle never cheated on him and yet when she's on the plane taking her to her man, she serves herself on a silver platter to two passengers.
Interestingly, the plane scene is put as a flashback after we saw her making love with her husband. This is a woman who knows about love but handles sex as a mystery, when she teases these two travelers, is she testing her sex-appeal or is she too much aware of it? That she literally donates her body to the first newcomer makes tempting to classify as an easy woman but in reality, she's too conscious of the complexity of sexual attraction, she enjoys the tension implied by the desire rather than the ephemeral pleasure and the stream of emptiness that comes after. Desire should be more than a quest for pleasure.
And that might explain the choice of the director to shoot the marital sex scene under the veil of a mosquito net directing our attention to the interplay between the two Thai servants and culminating with certainly the film's first shock. That moment gets us prepared, announcing the kind of dirty stuff contained in that vast spectrum of sexual games, and our hypocrisy toward them. Since there's an inner transgressive quality in sex, how does that combine itself with good behavior? And can eroticism be a philosophy of the body that set itself apart from ethics or another philosophy, hedonism to name it? Maybe there's more than pleasure in that erotic initiation.
And baking under the sun and melancholy, Emmanuelle wanders from one place to another, being verbally hazed by bourgeois housewives bragging about their sexual exploits, expecting to find a mentor. Her curiosity is raised by the youngest one who enjoys teasing older men with a lollipop then she has a sensual relationship with her squash partner, the blasé Ariane. Her initiation goes on with Bee, a beautiful blonde, who unlike the others, has a job: she's an archaeologist, and maybe because she's got a life of her own, she doesn't beat around the bush and after an idyllic episode, lets Emmanuelle go. She doesn't love her but like her enough not to hurt her. The "Bee" sequence proves the bias of the director, he doesn't show them having sex because he cares for passionate sex and believes that this passion had to be driven by transgression.
And this is where Alain Cuny's character makes his entrance as the pygmalion. At that point, I won't spoil the rest of the film, I will only say that the final act of "Emmanuelle" marks the climax of the heroine's coming of age and seals the film's legacy. She learns (the hard way) the layers of eroticism according to her mentor and some are petty shocking. However, no matter how far it goes, we had to time to relate to Emmanuelle and to accept that she would go that far for the sake of discovery, one that goes beyond the judgmental barriers because of its transgressive nature. It is a character study after all, but where love itself and sex are treated as characters.
And "Emmanuelle" treats its material with dazzling imagery, beautifying our ugliest impulses, and making a real landmark of the erotic film, one that spanned many sequels and that made this one the most successful film of 1974. It's beautiful to look at this film, sometimes disturbing, but it always finds a way to be fascinating.
And I learned to be part of that show-a-little-and-enjoy-a-lot little game and appreciate the silly magic of these mindless stories set in ridiculously grandiose places, where love scenes were choreographed in slow motion under the smooth sound of a saxophone, allowing butlers or maids to break their routine through a session of window shopping. The love scenes could take place on the canopy of some Henry VIII room, in the vicinity of a vast swimming pool or under a chestnut tree not too far from the vineyard, the setting counted.
When the same thing happened over and over, the softcore film had to delight the eyes on another level than eroticism, if you don't admire nature of furniture at some point, something is missing. And it's not that "Emmanuelle" is a great erotic film because it set all these patterns but it's a classic because its French 'new look' treated a minor genre as if it was a major one.And "Emmanuelle" has everything: the candid heroin with an unexplainable thirst for sexual discovery, boredom and ennui making sex the only possible palliative, the exotic luxuriant setting adding to the luxurious places and a sweet little tone that poetically captures the spirit of the heroine if you have the chance to understand French.
There's something about the way the film looks, the way it sounds and the way director Just Jaeckin elevate it as close to a character study as an erotic film can get and whether its take on eroticism should make us laugh or cringe or think, it does, there comes a point where you cease to look at it as "just an erotic film". And it has to do with the the magnetic and enigmatic performance of Sylvia Kristel (who sadly left us in 2012), Emmanuelle is a young woman married to a French diplomat based in Bangkok. The husband is an enthusiast of free love and allows Emmanuelle to have other encounters. Despite her free-pass, Emmanuelle never cheated on him and yet when she's on the plane taking her to her man, she serves herself on a silver platter to two passengers.
Interestingly, the plane scene is put as a flashback after we saw her making love with her husband. This is a woman who knows about love but handles sex as a mystery, when she teases these two travelers, is she testing her sex-appeal or is she too much aware of it? That she literally donates her body to the first newcomer makes tempting to classify as an easy woman but in reality, she's too conscious of the complexity of sexual attraction, she enjoys the tension implied by the desire rather than the ephemeral pleasure and the stream of emptiness that comes after. Desire should be more than a quest for pleasure.
And that might explain the choice of the director to shoot the marital sex scene under the veil of a mosquito net directing our attention to the interplay between the two Thai servants and culminating with certainly the film's first shock. That moment gets us prepared, announcing the kind of dirty stuff contained in that vast spectrum of sexual games, and our hypocrisy toward them. Since there's an inner transgressive quality in sex, how does that combine itself with good behavior? And can eroticism be a philosophy of the body that set itself apart from ethics or another philosophy, hedonism to name it? Maybe there's more than pleasure in that erotic initiation.
And baking under the sun and melancholy, Emmanuelle wanders from one place to another, being verbally hazed by bourgeois housewives bragging about their sexual exploits, expecting to find a mentor. Her curiosity is raised by the youngest one who enjoys teasing older men with a lollipop then she has a sensual relationship with her squash partner, the blasé Ariane. Her initiation goes on with Bee, a beautiful blonde, who unlike the others, has a job: she's an archaeologist, and maybe because she's got a life of her own, she doesn't beat around the bush and after an idyllic episode, lets Emmanuelle go. She doesn't love her but like her enough not to hurt her. The "Bee" sequence proves the bias of the director, he doesn't show them having sex because he cares for passionate sex and believes that this passion had to be driven by transgression.
And this is where Alain Cuny's character makes his entrance as the pygmalion. At that point, I won't spoil the rest of the film, I will only say that the final act of "Emmanuelle" marks the climax of the heroine's coming of age and seals the film's legacy. She learns (the hard way) the layers of eroticism according to her mentor and some are petty shocking. However, no matter how far it goes, we had to time to relate to Emmanuelle and to accept that she would go that far for the sake of discovery, one that goes beyond the judgmental barriers because of its transgressive nature. It is a character study after all, but where love itself and sex are treated as characters.
And "Emmanuelle" treats its material with dazzling imagery, beautifying our ugliest impulses, and making a real landmark of the erotic film, one that spanned many sequels and that made this one the most successful film of 1974. It's beautiful to look at this film, sometimes disturbing, but it always finds a way to be fascinating.