“Emmanuelle is a woman who does not reach climax, she is in search of a lost pleasure. She flies to Hong Kong alone on a business trip. In this sensual city, where she initiates numerous encounters, she meets Kei, a man who avoids her… San Sebastian Festival, premiere in competition!!”, wrote Audrey Diwan on her Twitter (now X) after hearing the news. that his new film, Emmanuelle, will open the next San Sebastián Film Festival.
After the success of The event, where the French director adapted the novel of the same name by Annie Ernaux (for which she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, thus becoming the sixth woman to win this award), Emmanuelle is one of the most anticipated premieres of the year: a new revision of the famous erotic classic starring Noémie Merlant and written with Rebecca Zlotowski, a revision that Diwan herself announces as “an exploration of pleasure in the post-Me Too era.” “This film is based on the search for pleasure, and a lost pleasure. I try to tell the film through Emmanuelle’s feelings. Each sequence is like an exploration. Winning the Golden Lion gave me the freedom to try something very different and explore. From there came the motivation for this film,” she explained in an interview for deadline the last December.
“I have finished putting into words what is revealed to me as a total human experience of life and death, of time, of morality and what is prohibited, of the law, an experience lived from beginning to end through of the body,” Ernaux wrote in The event, the novel in which the Nobel Prize winner in Literature narrated the terrifying experience of her clandestine abortion in the early 60s, when she was a young student and abortion was still criminalized in France. Almost 20 years after the first publication of the book (in France it was published by Gallimard in 2000 and in Spain by Tusquets in 2019), Diwan brought it to the big screen in an overwhelming film about the desire for freedom of a woman alone before the world. , about a woman who has no choice but to put her life at risk to save herself, who tries to be free despite having everything against her.
The director, screenwriter and also a journalist and writer (she debuted in the novel with The Fabrication of a mensongeon the subject of marriage) knew how to capture the essence of Ernaux’s story, reflect a society that legally and morally condemned abortion, that harshly punished the unwanted consequences of sex for single women without the means to confront them, tell the story of a young woman who must face that experience in the most absolute loneliness, physically and emotionally.
Starting from there, it is interesting to wonder what we can expect from Diwan’s review of a film that marked an entire generation, an erotic myth of the 70s and, for some, a controversial feminist icon. “Jaeckin’s famous version of Emmanuelle was a symbol for an entire generation that went to France to see it, because it was prohibited here. It was not only the curiosity about sex that was denied to us in Spain, but also the fresh air that was beginning to flow in a country that was emerging, little by little, from the long night of Franco’s rule. For the San Sebastián Festival it is very important to open with Audrey Diwan’s new film, in which she confronts this entire myth of eroticism. We really wanted to see how he told this story about a woman and her search for sexual pleasure,” explains José Luis Rebordinos, director of the San Sebastian festival regarding the announcement. Regarding the adaptation of Just Jaeckin, Núria Vidal also remembers: “In ’74 she was still without a passport and without the right to have one because she was tried and convicted by the TOP (the Public Order Court). So she settled for accompanying her friends to Port Bou and there I said goodbye to them. I waited for them at a small hotel in town and when they returned they told me what they had seen. My first contact with Emmanuelle (and with many more films) were his stories.” The historic film critic and writer would not see it until February 1978, four years after the premiere. “I watched a lot of movies because of my work at the National Film Archive of Spain in Barcelona, and I tried not to miss a single premiere. Emmanuelle did not impress me, at Filmo we saw much more provocative and risky things, but she did entertain me. I had the impression of being in front of a luxuriously wrapped and slightly cloying candy. “I think it did a lot of good for the country to discover that erotic cinema could be beautiful.”
Although little is known about who actually wrote the original novel on which the different film adaptations of Emmanuelle, some sources claim that the author is a Frenchwoman of Thai origin called Marayat Bibidh and hidden behind the pseudonym Emmanuelle Arsan, born in 1932 (or in 1940, this is not entirely clear either) and married to a French diplomat, whom she also The possible authorship of the work has been attributed to him. The book would then be a kind of autobiographical novel in which Arsan narrates the sexual adventures of the very young wife of an engineer destined for Thailand, whom she hopes to meet after spending a few months alone in Paris. Already on the plane, Emmanuelle will indulge in her most secret fantasies, but it will be in the exotic country she is heading to where she will be introduced to an Italian nobleman named Mario, an art lover and collector, who will guide her in the search for pleasure and in a philosophy of Eros supposedly freed from taboos. Apparently, this first volume (subtitled “The Lesson of Man”) was published in France for the first time in 1959 and was distributed clandestinely, but it would not be until 1974, with the film directed by Just Jaeckin (director of other erotic films like the also controversial Story of O) and starring the Dutch actress and model Sylvia Kristel, when the character of Emmanuelle would become world famous. Probably, much of the success is due to the charisma and sensuality of Kristel, who, forever associated with this role, would never cease to be an erotic myth for the generations of the late 20th century. The scope was such that, in 1981, the Italian illustrator and cartoonist Guido Crepax, famous for his Valentina series, would also make his personal version of Emmanuelle, focusing on the link between wild nature and sex.
For some, both the novel and the film are nothing more than a reflection of the male fantasies of the time; for others, the vindication of feminine pleasure and the different possibilities that desire and sex can offer, beyond heteronormative relationships. Although in France in the 70s what Jaeckin’s film showed should no longer be groundbreaking (it should be remembered that May 1968 in France began with the sexual revolution, which began in the mid-sixties with the hippie movement in the United States), The situation was very different in the case of Spain, where it was censored until 1978, then hitting theaters under the newly released ‘S’ rating, used for a cinema halfway between exposure and imminent porn. In a country where any insinuation in print or on screen of a sexual nature or of a woman’s body was cause for public scandal and threat of jail and thousands of Spaniards crossed the border to see the famous film starring Kristel, Emmanuelle It would not only become part of our cinematographic history, but also social and political.
Viewed over time, regardless of who wrote the original novel, Jaeckin’s adaptation feels like a film about the pursuit of female pleasure filmed for the pursuit of male pleasure. There are aspects that make it too obvious who is behind the camera and what their objective is: the constant display of a woman’s body that is always normative, a female orgasm also far from reality (generally, women do not usually cum in a matter of seconds just by seeing a man’s face in a magazine, even if that man is Paul Newman) or a scene of a “supposedly consensual” rape. Therefore, it is if possible more interesting to return to the question about the new version of Diwan. In it, will Emmanuelle continue to be defined by her relationship with a man? Will she be a fundamentally passive object in her sexual experiences? What will her pursuit of her pleasure be like? Will there be a male figure to guide her? Will that search consist of accepting sexual proposals from men and women who desire it and on the terms they desire? Or will Emmanuelle be the active subject of her encounters? Will there be a more diverse and true representation of the woman’s body? Will she address other sensitive topics such as consent? Will she offer a more complex portrait of her protagonist? Will it question the idea of femininity that Jaeckin proposed? Will it reformulate the notion of eroticism? Ultimately, will this review be a film concerned with a more realistic representation of female desire, pleasure, and sexuality?
“At first, when I write, I always feel the need to seek an intimate connection with the story,” Diwan said for deadline. “So my film will take place in the present day, Emmanuelle is a woman who is close to my age. She wanted to explore her search for pleasure, what she represents when you have already made a path in your life. When we are not in discovery, but in investigation. With my co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski, we imagine a woman who has power, who has fought to get ahead, has climbed her mountain and has also built herself armor. She feels alone. But how to get out of loneliness? Emmanuelle is the story of a woman who tries to let herself go. “The whole movie is about charting a path toward each other.”
Although we will still have to wait until September to try to resolve some of the many questions that Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle raises, what seems to be clear taking into account the French director’s steps is that her post-Me Too review promises to be much more complex , suggestive and deeply political than its mythical predecessor.
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