20/09/2024 - Audrey Diwan directs an impressive feminist version of Emmanuelle starring a dazzling Noémie Merlant

Just Jaeckin’s 1974 Emmanuelle, inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan's novel of the same name, told the story of a young newlywed woman who travels to Bangkok to join her husband. There, encouraged by him, she would be initiated into free sex by a teenage girl and guided in the search for pleasure and a supposedly taboo-free philosophy of Eros by a mature man called Mario.

The new Emmanuelle [+see also:
trailer
interview: Audrey Diwan
film profile] is directed by Audrey Diwan, the Golden Lion-winning director of Happening [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Anamaria Vartolomei
film profile], and co-written with Rebecca Zlotowski, and will be the opening film in competition at the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival. In this instance, the novel and the mythical film that preceded it is turned on its head to tell the story of a woman in search of a lost pleasure. The new Emmanuelle is no longer a woman who accompanies her husband and who goes in search of pleasure through him, but a woman who travels alone to Hong Kong on a business trip, and who, in the hotel where she will work, will initiate different encounters (alone and accompanied) that will lead her to explore her own desire.

An impressive and sensual Noémie Merlant stars in the role of an apparently rigid, confident woman, with a certain irony, but with that latent eroticism, visceral inside. Two contrasting spaces are used with the closed, elegant and artificial hotel on the one hand and on the other, the warm, dirty and more real Hong Kong. The film manages to reflect with subtlety, courage and great visual power the feminine exploration of pleasure and desire. Diwan therefore manages to narrate dark and elusive matters in images with daring and a unique sensitivity. From the struggle between reason and instinct (very present in Sade's work) to what sex says about ourselves, the traumas, fears, longings, egos, dissatisfactions, vulnerabilities, voids, the secret searches within it, the ghosts of desire, its contradictory nature, the possibility or not of limits, its risks and what the will to assume them also says about us, how far we are capable of going in this search and experimentation, desire as a possibility of freedom and also of condemnation.

The result is a much more cerebral and political film than its predecessors (there are several versions of Emmanuelle), with a refined, delicate style. From beginning to end it is highly sensorial and suggestive, full of mystery (the soundtrack also aids in giving it a ghostly feel and a certain intrigue), with a protagonist full of magic and depth, and a lucid staging that speaks to this latent contradiction between the exterior and the interior, of the prisons that we all are for ourselves. There are dialogues that leave their mark, but the great strength of the film lies in the images that with very little, a look, an expression, a silence, a precise gesture, are able to capture and convey an emotion, a sensation, a feeling, a desire, that which is not said but is present.

Audrey Diwan's Emmanuelle is no longer a film about the pursuit of female pleasure filmed for the pursuit of male pleasure, but a film about the power of desire and the ability of women to explore for themselves and decide on that desire. A truly feminist film, which places the woman at the forefront as a desiring subject, full of beauty, cinematic power and sensuality. An impressive film, with a dazzling Noémie Merlant in probably one of her greatest performances, whose images will live on in the memory of some viewers.

Emmanuelle is a co-production between the companies Chantelouve, Rectangle Productions and Goodfellas, whose international sales are managed by the US company The Veterans.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)