Emmanuelle: a joyless remake of the 1970s soft-core sensation

A notoriously blue movie gets a depressingly grey remake in Audrey Diwan’s dismal Emmanuelle, an ostensibly feminist take on the 1970s softcore phenomenon, that mainly serves the misconception that there is nothing witty or fun or remotely sexy about feminism. Say what you will about the objectionable original, at least you got the impression that the heroine of 1974’s Emmanuelle derived some pleasure from being the pliant plaything of the patriarchy. Not so this updated girlboss version – better call her Emm-ennui-elle for all the sophisticate apathy she exudes – who is undoubtedly the agent of her own promiscuity, but remains robotically removed from any associated physical enjoyment. Here, her hottest encounter is with an ice cube. 

Stiff in all the wrong places, the screenplay by Diwan and Rebecca Zlotowski, introduces us to Emmanuelle (a miscast Noémie Merlant) having joyless sex with a stranger in a first-class airplane bathroom. There’s a similar scene in the original, but here Emmanuelle isn’t gasping and writhing beneath her faceless hookup, just staring dully at her own reflection throughout, fruitlessly searching her own eyes for any flicker of arousal. On her way back to her seat, she exchanges loaded glances with Kei (Will Sharpe, doing his best), a stranger who then turns up as a VIP guest at the 7-star Hong Kong hotel where Emmanuelle is also staying.

It’s a work trip for Emmanuelle, who’s been sent in to discreetly investigate hotel manager Margo (Naomi Watts, for some reason). So in between trysts — an antiseptic three-way and an ongoing dalliance with local escort Zelda (Chacha Huang) — Emmanuelle glides through the hotel’s tastefully underlit hallways as though glazed in Teflon, checking on the petits fours and measuring the housekeeping response time. It gives us dowdy normals a glimpse of the lifestyle expectations of the inexcusably wealthy – like the 50 Shades and 365 Days franchises, the movie’s imagination is less erotic than economic. 

So the sexiest thing about Emmanuelle is the soft furnishings. But this peek at .01% culture, hermetically insulated from the Hong Kong hubbub to the point that the hotel residents panic only when a brief power outage interrupts their lounge-jazz cocktail hour, mainly instills a kind of relief that you couldn’t possibly afford ever to be this bored. It’s a conclusion that Emmanuelle finally arrives at too when, in pursuit of the vaporously enigmatic Kei, she escapes the hotel and is rewarded with a climax, which is a huge anticlimax. But then, that’s only fitting for Emmanuelle, which turns a 1970s smut-sensation into such an effective mood-killer you could use it in place of a safe word. 

► Emmanuelle is available in UK cinemas from 17 January.