Film Review: Emmanuelle (2024)

When I heard that the Emmanuelle series, after a long gap, was getting basically a reboot, with the setting changed to the present day, I was curious about what form it would take. On the one hand, our current period of Intimacy Consultants, and understanding the idea that a sex scene in a film can itself tell a story, could make for actually better depictions of sex and sexuality than Just Jaekin did in the original film. On the other hand, there is a degree of puritanism going on in modern film where even if a film has nudity and sex, it tends to be judgemental about it (and a generation of Gen-Zs who have had Puriteen propaganda shoved at them leading to distressingly more of that generation than I’d like – though anything greater than zero is more than I’d like – going conservative, anti-proshipper and TERF aren’t helping), which could make the film miss the point. The question is – which is it?

The short answer is, it misses the point. This film’s version of Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) is a Quality Control troubleshooter for a luxury hotel chain instead of being either the spouse of or herself being a diplomat. She has come to Hong Kong because that hotel’s ratings have dipped below those of a competitor, and the board wants to find a reason to kick the manager, Margot (Naomi Watts), under the bus. While there, she has a fling with a local escort, Zelda (Chacha Huang), and becomes obsessed with one of the Hotel’s guests – Kei (Will Sharpe).

Let’s get the positives out of the way first. The film is gorgeously shot. There’s excellent lighting and framing that helps convey how truly luxurious this hotel is, including some very deliberately painterly shots that convey the artificial beauty of the hotel, along with the work that goes into making it that way. This is accompanied by an unobtrusive but well done score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine that reinforces this. The cast is also very good with the material they’re given.

From Left, Zelda and Emmanuelle from Emmanuelle (2024)

The problem is with that material and some of the direction around it. In the novel, Emmanuelle is a character who is sexually active, enjoys sex, is in an open relationship with her husband (who both love each other), but over the course of the first novel goes on a journey of discovery free of the restraints imposed by Continental European society of what sex means to her, with sexual “mentor” figures of Marie-Anne and Mario, two other members of emigre community. Now, Mario gets into some extremely man-splain-y territory that is to the Novel’s detriment (and is likely a contribution of the Author’s husband), but it does a good job of conveying the idea that Emmanuelle enjoys her hedonistic lifestyle, she’s not doing it because of some inner trauma or because her marriage is unhappy. She’s also not shown as cruel nor abusive in her relationships, in either of the first two books.

Also, the sex in both of those books is extremely spicy. Like “Ghost Pepper” level spicy. As in “these sex scenes could only be adapted as written on the page in live action by Adult Time or another porn studio.” It could be done in the period in animation, but there isn’t that much well animated hentai anymore, so it’s not clear if you could get enough of the quality of animators who’d want to draw this on the project.

I say all of that because this film misses that point. We see Emmanuelle have a couple meaningless hookups early on in the film, but they’re not particularly erotically shot, and there’s a conscious focus on Emmanuelle’s expression, and she doesn’t look like she’s enjoying herself. Even when the film has its version of the scene in the book where Marie-Anne and Emmanuelle schlick in front of each other, with Zelda serving as a replacement for Marie-Anne, it’s clear that while Zelda is enjoying herself, Emmanuelle is more worried about being caught. Repeatedly her dialogue emphasizes, until very late in the film, that she’s a person who cares about what’s permitted by the rules, instead of what’s morally right or what’s right for her needs.

Then there’s Kei as our surrogate for Mario. On the one hand, he’s not spouting out man-splain-y dialogue about how love doesn’t exist and it’s an illusion women make up to justify their sexual desires. On the other hand, he’s also a character who uses his psychological pain as a distancing mechanism, and psychoanalyzes Emmanuelle as someone is trying to drown out her own pain using sex. It makes the film feel like an Emmanuelle film in name only. The title character only feels like an Emmanuelle by the last 30 minutes of the movie. By that time I’m tuned out of the film.

I wanted to like this film, and I think you can have a good modern Emmanuelle film, even within the more softcore constraints of mainstream film and TV. However, this film isn’t it. The writers and director feel like when they analyzed the text, they took a sort of second wave, sex-negative interpretation of the title character away.

If you decide you do want to watch this movie, the JustWatch info is below.