‘Emmanuelle’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. Audrey Diwan. France. 2024. 105mins

A paralysingly pointless punch-up of the French 1970s soft-porn franchise, Emmanuelle sees Venice Golden Lion winner Audrey Diwan take an all-expenses-paid trip to seven-star Hong Kong luxury where hotel inspector Emmanuelle (Noemie Merlant) will attempt to lose some of her ‘stiffness’ by getting it on with staff and guests alike. There’s scant sex in Emmanuelle, though, (which was the entire point of the French novel/films) and enough risable English-language dialogue to keep drag queen brunches supplied with material for years to come — if they can make it through the 105-minute running time and a zero-stakes premise.

Vacuously silky

No male director would make, or be financed to make, Emmanuelle now, and Diwan (Happening), writing with Rebecca Złotowski, makes no case for why a woman should either. Opening the San Sebastián Film Festival, this vacuously silky drama heads next to Tokyo, but Asian audiences might not take too kindly to being played for sexy set dressing yet again after a raft of such features kicked off by the original Emmanuelle’s trip to Thailand in 1974. Fans of 50 Shades Of Grey may be tempted by the premise, but there’s really no substance here to whip them up, apart from lashings of vanilla.

Diwan and Zlotowski attempt to update the premise by turning Emmanuelle into a backless-dress-wearing inspector of upscale luxury hotels and open the proceedings with her swanking down an airplane aisle with a come-hither look to join the ‘mile high club’ in the bathroom with an anonymous fellow traveller. (Such ‘transgressive’ preoccupations seem so Erica de Jong/‘zipless fuck’ now in the era of pornhub.) On her way out of the roomy business class bog she spots Kei (Will Sharpe).

Soon Emmanuelle is listlessly roaming around the Rosefield Palace Hotel in Hong Kong (the St Regis, whose views provide all the film’s highlights). She’s supposedly inspecting the staff, but also avails herself of the opportunity to have a brief threesome with a couple of guests and masturbate in a potting shed with a local prostitute who frequents the pool (Chacha Huang, forced bizarrely to regurgitate tracts of Wuthering Heights).

Naomi Watts plays the manager of the hotel and there’s a half-hearted attempt to pit the two women against each other, with Emmanuelle instructed to find fault with her work. Mostly she’s there, though, to wear power dresses and deliver some declamatory dialogue about hotel excellence. Where in the world do people talk like this? When Emmanuelle asks Kei, who turns out to be staying at the Rosefield, who he is, the response is, “I’m a Frequent International Traveller, a FIT!”.

FIT or not (and, he is), you know Kei is different to the rest of mankind because he wears a safari jacket and swarthily doesn’t shave. Who is this sexpot who evades the hotel’s security cameras (operated by Anthony Wong) and never sleeps in his room? Who cares? He builds dams, as it turns out, and Emmanuelle certainly has one to unplug. Soon Emmanuelle is ‘doing a Barry’ and drinking Kei’s bathwater, but mostly she looks like she’s waiting for the Vogue photographer to arrive to capture that Fendi silk suit. 

Just when the film is about to suck itself down the plughole of high-end inertia, a typhoon arrives, which prompts Diwan to take Emmanuelle out of the hotel - over an hour into the film’s runtime - and head for Chungking Mansions, where we can only remember Wong Kar-wai and hope for better films to come.

According to the notes accompanying the film, Diwan wasn’t aware of the Emmanuelle franchise when she was approached to make this film. There’s certainly no sense watching it that it has any connection with its makers. Unless it’s all a big joke - if Joe Eszterhas can write Showgirls, why can’t Diwan/Zlotowski give Emmanuelle a glow-up? You might suspect that’s the case, initially, when Emmanuelle’s poor room service attendant is suspected of watching her in the bath as she hacks her landing strip with a razor.  There’s also a few ripe fast cuts to an orchid, or a melting peony, when her fancy is tickled. The blank, robotic delivery of dialogue surely must be for some reason. But it’s never followed through, and mostly Emmanuelle feels like a package and looks like packaged luxury, the kind that comes with money and not very much taste.