Dir: Audrey Diwan | Cast: Noemie Merlant, Will Sharpe, Naomi Watts, James Campbell Bower, Chacha Huang, Anthony Wong | Erotic thriller 94′
Emmanuelle is an evocative exploration of female desire set in plush surroundings with captivating performances from Noemie Merlant, Will Sharpe ad Emily Watts.
On an empty plane a woman imagines being in the ‘mile-high’ club with a dark stranger. French actor Noemie Merlant is Emmanuelle and this is the first of her erotic fantasias in the Orient.
In HongKong, ensconced in the sensuous elegance of a swish skyscraper (actually the St Regis Hotel) her mission as a shark – or quality control agent of a leading hotel group – is twofold: to rate the hotel’s facilities with coded colours, and to find a way of ousting the impressive Guest Relations manager Margot Parson who is deemed ‘too expensive’ in her job of analysing the establishment’s regular FITs (frequent international travellers) and responding to their individual needs. Emmanuelle’s first task will be easy, the second not so: Naomi Watts is superb in the role of Parson, a consummate professional who’s cannily aware of her potential demise. She’s just one of the authentic characters who inhabit this rather sinuous, erotic thriller; easy on the eye with its glamorous ambiance devised by award-winning designer Katia Wyszkop (The Beast), impressive camerawork from DoP Laurent Tangy, and a rhythmic soundtrack from Evgueni and Sacha Galperine.
The film’s writers Rebecca Zlotowski and Audrey Dirwan (who also directs) were inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s 1967 best seller which formed the basis of an uneven series of films starring Sylvia Kristel. Full of cliches and maxims the spare script perfectly fits the campy ambiance, so don’t expect deep social commentary: this is ’90’s style soft-core sortie into female imagination, an erotic take on Anita Brookner’s ‘Hotel du Lac’ – or even Fatal Attraction, but here the women are in control. Certainly knocks Fifty Shades of Grey into a cocked hat. If Emmanuelle were trans it would certainly ramp up the critical acclaim.
Noemi Merlant plays the eponymous siren as a curiously stiff, snide and disapproving businesswoman, but not without sex appeal, in her starchy colonial style outfits and silky negligee. After a languorous bath in her suite over-looking the bay, a stiff-one in the bar leads to un-involving sex with a couple she meets there. Another strand, involving an escort called Zelda (Huang) posing as a literature student, doesn’t quite come off (although strangely these are the film’s most sexually explicit scenes (for men) with the women touching themselves up etc (just off camera).
Merlant soon mellows when a mysterious Asian stranger catches her eye. She noticed him on the plane and was intrigued by his indifference: And there’s nothing that irks a woman more than a dishy professional man who fails to submit to her enticing body language, albeit subtle, as in this case. Will Sharpe’s Kei Shinohara is just the man for the job, and Emmanuelle’s imagination smoulders.
According to security (Anthony Wong) the ‘ocean’ engineer always books suite 2701 but never sleeps there, coming and going at will, often disappearing. Mysterious. Effortless. Emmanuelle is drawn under his spell (even drinking his bathwater, and sleeping in his bed alone). This is a layered look at how a woman can become sexually obsessed by the thought of a remote, seemingly unobtainable man, who also claims to have lost his desire. This acts as a red rag to Emmanuelle’s ecstasy. She’s actually enjoying herself in the process and nothing has happened between them. But a slow, tantalising seduction has begun, in her mind, at least. But what about him? Is this reverse psychology? Shinohara’s enigmatic charms and casual insouciance are key to his exotic allure, along with the subtle come-on he offers her, a gold lighter with an inscription, leading her on a febrile escapade through the steamy gambling dens and mahjong salons of HongKong to pin him down, and getting tremendous pleasure in doing so. He is the trigger but her pleasure is self-actualised.
The final scene is a steamy tour de force. You’ll either smile or throw up your hands in disbelief but this latest incarnation may even become a cult classic along with the 1974 original. @MeredithTaylor
PREMIERE AT SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL | NOW IN CINEMAS IN FRANCE/BELGIUM before a NETFLIX release