An effective way to unravel
Emmanuelle
(Just Jaeckin, 1974) begins with its famous poster, which shows the leading actress, Sylvia Kristel, semi-naked, sitting on a rattan chair and adorned with a string of pearls.
Not only because almost all the elements of the film are contained in it – even if the image does not appear in it – but because each of these components reveals its paradoxical nature.
Any conclusion obtained is confronted with its opposite in a second approximation, just as happens in the film.
Emmanuelle shows her bare breasts over the white lace dress, but she also wears thick knee-high wool socks and lace-up ankle boots, while she brings the pearls to her mouth.
All of this is a way of instigating erotic tension resulting from other tensions, those that occur between attire and nudity, innocence and debauchery, but it also corresponds to the codes of representation of the bourgeois.
Her eyes are directed to those of the viewer, while her left leg is crossed over her right, covering her sex: there is, therefore, a double message of incitement and impediment.
Everything about the Filipino chair – since then known in Europe as the Emmanuelle chair –, which refers to an orientalizing exoticism to Western tastes, and with tropical plants in the background.
A wicker chair, pearls, wool socks and ankle boots: the eternal image of 'Emmanuelle', which curiously does not appear in the film.Rue des Archives (©Rue des Archives/Collection CSF / Cordon Press)
This year marks half a century since the premiere of
Emmanuelle
, a cultural phenomenon that went far beyond box office success, and which has gone through various stages in the appreciation of critics and the public.
After the initial furor – in central Paris alone it attracted more than three million spectators for a total population of about two million – it came to be considered a by-product of a certain situation already overcome, but also to be claimed as a manifesto of the sexual revolution. , to later serve as an object of analysis from feminist perspectives.
More information
When the uncovering was more than tits and 'manolos': how to rediscover the most reviled cinema in Spain
Two years ago, the French filmmaker and critic Clélia Cohen directed the documentary
Emmanuelle, la plus longue caresse du cinéma français
(
Emmanuelle, the longest caress of French cinema
), which highlighted the links with the post-May 1968 emancipation. Shortly before, had announced the project of a series, currently on hold, on the biography of Sylvia Kristel (1952-2012), protagonist of the original film, which resonates especially in the times of #MeToo.
And a kind of
remake
that director Audrey Diwan – author of
The Event
(2021), about women's right to abortion – has shot will soon be released, with Noémie Merlant and Naomi Watts in its cast.
Feel good without feeling bad
The
Emmanuelle
of 1974 narrated the erotic adventures of a young French woman in an open marriage with a diplomat, within the framework of an aspirational magazine report Thailand.
Although her sex scenes – always simulated – did not exceed the average level of what can be found today on
streaming
platforms , for the commercial cinema of the time they were unusually explicit.
Up to 43 “official” films were shot with the
Emmanuelle
label , to which we must add countless exploitations.
This includes a black Emmanuelle (
Black Emmanuelle
, 1975), a nun (
Suor Emanuelle
, 1977), and an intergalactic one (
Emmanuelle in Space
, 1994).
Poster in English for the film 'Emmanuelle', with the promotional line 'Cinema X was never like this'.Movie Poster Image Art (Getty Images)
Sylvia Kristel in front of a poster for 'Emmanuelle' during the film's promotion in England, in 1974. Evening Standard (Getty Images)
50 years ago, when the original was released, the land was adequately fertilized.
The shock wave of May '68 had brought a relaxation of sexual mores prone to experimentation and questioning of monogamy.
Research on sexuality by Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson had paved the way for publications such as the best-selling
Open Marriage: A
New
Life Style,
in which Nena and George O'Neill outlined the promising possibilities of open marriage.
In France, Georges Pompidou died, the conservative Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had just been elected President of the French Republic, defeating the socialist Mitterrand, after wielding – what a paradox – the electoral promise of eliminating censorship, which generated a wave of erotic premieres of which
Emmanuelle
was the flagship.
Shortly before, an advance had emerged:
Last Tango in Paris
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972),
La gran comilona
(1973, Marco Ferreri) or
La mama y la puta
(1973, Jean Eustache) already incorporated libertine plot elements and realistic sexual scenes in a context, let's say, prestigious, far from pornographic.
However, in them the sexual was a way to express a certain discomfort and question the prevailing institutions, while
Emmanuelle
reflected a carefree and hedonistic posture, with a vocation of spicy seasoning in the stew of the bourgeois: her slogan for the Anglo-Saxon market, “the movie that will make you feel good without feeling bad,” did not hide its intentions.
Sylvia Kristel and Alain Cuny in 'Emmanuelle'.Rue des Archives (©Rue des Archives/Collection CSF / Cordon Press)
The project arose from Yves Rousset-Roard, a former notary clerk recently converted into a film producer determined to debut with the adaptation of the erotic novel
Emmanuelle
, signed in 1959 by Emmanuelle Arsan.
Under this pseudonym hid Marayat Bibidh, a woman from Thai high society, daughter of a diplomat and married to Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, a French United Nations official stationed in Bangkok.
As has often been argued, in reality the author of Emmanuelle could be Rollet-Andriane himself, a fan of erotic literature, or it could be a work of four hands.
This was confirmed in 2016 by the Danish writer Suzanne Brøgger, a friend of the couple, in her postface for the book
La philosophie nue
.
Marlon Brando, lagarterana
To direct the film, another debutant was chosen, the young photographer Just Jaeckin, who had stood out for his fashion editorials, with a refined aestheticism.
According to Jaeckin, it was he who discovered Sylvia Kristel, who was passing through a casting for another film.
Kristel was then a 21-year-old Dutch model and actress, winner of the Miss TV Europe beauty pageant, paired with the prominent Belgian poet and novelist Hugo Claus (two and a half decades her senior), and with a history of family uprooting and a dismal episode of sexual abuse in childhood.
Since her acting experience was limited, and since at the end of the day the only thing that interested her was her image and her superb anatomy, her voice was dubbed on the soundtrack: the same would happen in practically all of Kristel's subsequent filmography, run over by the steamroller
Emmanuelle
.
Sylvia Kristel and Just Jaeckin, star and director of 'Emmanuelle', in Paris in 1974.Michel GINFRAY (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Sylvia Kristel appeared in three other films and a television series in the Emmanuelle saga, with decreasing but still considerable success.
Her best films –
Alice ou la fugue
(1977) by Claude Chabrol,
A Woman of Life
(1976) by Walerian Borowczyk or
René la Canne
(1977), by Francis Girod – were commercial failures that are almost impossible to find today.
Her acting skills were always refuted – “as an actress she has what Marlon Brando is as a lizard,” wrote critic Jordi Batlle Caminal in EL PAÍS in 1990 – although in fairness she never got many opportunities to demonstrate them.
Despite her command of English, Kristel was unable to develop a career in American cinema.
Some bad professional decisions – according to Jeremy Richey in his book
Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol
(2022), he would have rejected roles in
Bergman's
The Serpent's Egg , David Lynch's
Dune
and
Blue Velvet
, or
John Guillermin's
King Kong
– and his addiction to alcohol and cocaine didn't help either.
Sylvia Kristel photographed in 1974.Michel GINFRAY (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
The actress died as a result of cancer in 2006, after publishing a memoir in which she described with singular lucidity the ambivalent position in which she had been placed, that of a revered and at the same time denigrated star.
She was sorry that none of her non-erotic films had attracted audiences.
“I was dressed, but people preferred me naked,” she wrote.
“I spoke, but they preferred me silent or dubbed.
I realized that the public had been deeply affected by
Emmanuelle
and they wanted to prolong the fantasy of her, to keep me inside her, symbolic and naked, idealized and necessary.
Eroticism yes, but
Certainly, Emmanuelle
's success
exceeded all expectations.
Fifty million people came to see it in its long international premiere.
It ran for more than ten years at the Le Triomphe cinema on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.
In Spain we had to wait until 1978 – after Franco died – for it to reach theaters, where it sold more than three and a half million tickets, although by then countless curious spectators had crossed the Pyrenees with the sole purpose of participating in the phenomenon.
'Emmanuelle' spent ten years screening at the Parisian cinema Le Triomphe.
The image is from 1976.Francois LOCHON (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Its scandalous scent had swept the world, even though it came from a product that was actually quite conservative, subject to the bourgeois and patriarchal conceptions of its time.
Emmanuelle links extramarital affairs, including orgies and sex with strangers, but almost always supervised or observed by men.
The way in which nudity – almost always female – and sexual unions are filmed does not deviate one millimeter from what the feminist critic Laura Mulvey had called the male gaze in her famous essay
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
, written a year before the premiere of
Emmanuelle
and published a year later.
“The seventies are the birth of feminist film theories,” says Violeta Kovacsics, film critic and professor at the ESCAC (Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya).
“I think that in this case it is interesting to keep in mind Laura Mulvey's book, which precisely articulates a critique of the male gaze based on the Freudian notion of scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, very applicable in erotic cinema.
But, in addition, Mulvey detects a mechanism by which the gazes of the male characters converge, which are both that of the director and that of the viewer.
That is the male gaze: that of everyone, who observes, or observes, that female body.”
Sylvia Kristel and her partner, the writer Hugo Claus, photographed in England in 1974. Evening Standard (Getty Images)
The same principles operate in everything that concerns homosexuality.
Emmanuelle seeks pleasure in the bodies of other women, such as her friend Bee (played by Marika Green) and the young Marie-Ange (Christine Boisson, who was barely 18 years old at the time of filming and who would later say that she had also suffered sexual violence. in the childhood).
But these episodes do not so much favor the hypothesis of a lesbian Emmanuelle as the show served, once again, to the male gaze.
“These types of lesbian scenes seen from the point of view of a male
voyeur
are very typical of the
sexploitation
cinema of the 70s, and have marked the representation of lesbianism in cinema to this day,” supports Francina Ribes, PhD in Media. of Communication and Culture from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and author of the book
Absence and excess.
Killer lesbians and bisexuals in Hollywood cinema
(Dos Bigotes, 2022).
“In fact, the area of popular culture in which lesbianism has been most represented is pornography, always from that androcentric point of view and for the enjoyment of men.
This does not mean that lesbian and bisexual women have often appropriated these representations, partly due to the lack of other references and partly because, in some cases, these images open new horizons and can have an iconographic force that “It goes beyond the intention with which they were created.”
Fetishizing colonialism
Less studied have been the colonialist implications of the saga, which has tended to seek exotic locations in which the local inhabitants were limited to being figurative or to play the passive role of instruments of pleasure or to be observed as savages of uncontrollable sexuality.
Starting with the initial film, shot in Thailand, the only country in the Southeast Asian region that has not been a European colony (colonialism without a colony, therefore), and which at that time was going through a democratic period between two dictatorships.
In one of the final scenes, Emmanuelle, visiting a Thai boxing ring, offers herself as a trophy to the tough winner of the fight, and excitedly licks the sweat that dripped from her forehead, in what is nothing more than the fetishization of a body. exoticized
Sylvia Kristel signing autographs at a festival in France in 2008.Eric COLOMER (Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Two years later,
The Empire of the Senses would be released.
(1976), masterpiece by Japanese director Nagisa Osima about the intersections between desire and death.
Due to its complexity and its non-complacent approach to eroticism, its shocking scenes of unsimulated sex and the fact that it was directed by an oriental author, it could be interpreted as the exact reverse of
Emmanuelle
.
With all its contradictions, it is difficult to see in
Emmanuelle
anything more than an artifact intended to reinforce the bourgeois
status quo
from a vague appearance of transgression.
It is worth remembering that, in the middle of the 19th century, a theoretically much more modest novel,
Madame Bovary
, by Gustave Flaubert, triggered a judicial process for outrage to public and religious morality and good customs, that is, to the alphabet of institutions. bourgeois
An adaptation of
Madame Bovary
was precisely the project that Sylvia Kristel tried to bring to the screen to get out of her typecasting as
Emmanuelle
.
She never got it.
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