The Reel Review
Lustful Emmanuelle finds herself on a never-ending quest for sexual pleasure during an extended business trip to a luxury hotel in Hong Kong. Noémie Merlant, Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) and Naomi Watts star in this remake of the famous 1974 erotic drama that originally starred Dutch model Sylvia Kristel.
On the heels of her riveting and exceptionally well-done 2021 illegal abortion drama Happening, co-writer/director Audrey Diwan surprisingly misses the mark in this exceptionally limp remake of the softcore porn classic. The film features a bored (and surprisingly boring) titular character in a series of pointless, off-putting sexual encounters. What made the original film at least somewhat interesting was the at-the-time groundbreaking (albeit now cringeworthy) portrait of sexual awakening in a young woman. Even that is missing in this bland, unsexy remake.
Merlant (Tár, The Innocent, Portrait of a Lady on Fire) at least looks the part, with a confused-looking Sharpe as Emmanuelle’s elusive potential sex partner and a completely underutilized Watts as the manager of the luxury hotel where Emmanuelle has been sent to fire her. The cast tries, but the screenplay’s dialogue is just too embarrassingly bad, as is the abrupt and pointless, WTF ending. What a mess.
REEL FACTS
• The original 1974 Emmanuelle was the first X-rated film that Columbia Pictures released in the U.S., following the film’s enormous success in France. (One theater on the Champs-Elysees in Paris played the film for 13 years.) Its star, Sylvia Kristel, a lifelong smoker, died in October 2012 in her sleep at the age of 60 of esophageal and lung cancer.
• Noémie Merlant is a three-time Cesar award nominee, winning for Best Supporting Actress in 2022’s The Innocent.
• Filming in Hong Kong took place at Chungking Mansions, the main setting for Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 romantic crime thriller Chungking Express, one of Diwan’s favorite films. Located on Nathan Road near the MTR’s Tsim Sha Tsui station, the ethnically diverse, five-block building is comprised of tiny, inexpensive, low-end guesthouses, restaurants and shops.
Video & Photo
