HBO Revives The Lost Tradition Of Illicit Late-Night Pay Cable Sex Movies By Streaming a New ‘Emmanuelle’

Today’s kids, they probably just learn to discreetly click their laptop shut and have their browser history set to expunge regularly as needed. Do they even know the old ways? The ways that people born before the year 2000 or so might have had to scan the cable guides for what might be cooking after midnight, look up online which movies have which performers in a state of undress without necessarily finding a full excerpt streaming right there, and maybe have a finger poised near the “last channel” button to zip you back to Nickelodeon if you heard someone approaching the TV room? This is what you needed to do as a 20th century human looking for nudity on television.

In this context, a holy grail would be something like Emmanuelle. Emphasis on “something like,” because the original 1974 film, an X-rated French movie, would not have necessarily been in frequent circulation even on late-night HBO or Skinemax. Some of its sequels, including a few later-series experimentations with genuine hardcore (rather than softcore) sex scenes, were equally unlikely to pop up. However, lucky for enterprising filmmakers, “Emmanuelle” is just a name and 2, 3, 4, etc., are just numbers, meaning there could be a movie called, say, Emmanuelle, Queen of the Galaxy or Emmanuelle 2000, with no formal relationship to the original novel or films, and then appended with various numbers or subtitles. Queen of the Galaxy was actually the first installment in a series of TV movies under the umbrella of Emmanuelle in Space – seven installments all released in 1994. Another series of Emmanuelle movies explored different historical periods. These later installments were late-night pay-cable fixtures.

Now HBO Max is getting into that retro spirit with a new-ish Emmanuelle, a remake first released in 2024 now streaming on the service. This one does not take place in space or travel through time. It shares a few vague plot points with the movie that turned 50 the same year as the remake’s release; they both feature Emmanuelle having sex with a stranger on an airplane, and they both feature Emmanuelle encountering another woman and watching each other as they pleasure themselves. But in 2024, Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant, from Portrait of a Lady on Fire) is single, rather than married, and the movie takes place mostly at a luxury Hong Kong hotel, where Emmanuelle has arrived to survey the experience for quality control, at the behest of the hotel’s corporate parent. Eventually, corporate asks her to find specific fault with Margot (Naomi Watts), the manager they want to fire but have no real reason to.

Emmanuelle is both dedicated to her responsibility – evaluating the hotel service, anyway, not necessarily railroading Margot – and full of low-key existential ennui. There’s a certain cleverness in having a professional nitpicker of decadent luxury restlessly trying out various sexual encounters in search of novel pleasure, and that’s the basic gist of the movie; Emmanuelle swans around a hotel, having sex and eventually obsessing over the mysterious Kei (Will Sharpe, from Lena Dunham’s Too Much), a guest of the hotel who doesn’t seem to actually sleep there.

Emmanuelle ’24 is sleek-looking and smoothly directed by Audrey Diwan, who previously made the harrowingly effective drama Happening, about a young woman attempting to get a pre-legalization abortion in 1963 France. She’s got some range, in other words. There’s a stiffness to some of the dialogue and acting that makes the movie feel of a piece with the low-rent erotica with which it shares a name, but the filmmaking is hushed and moody enough that it could have aired on HBO at 10PM, say, instead of the illicit graveyard shift.

That’s also partially because Diwan has made an Emmanuelle that has vastly more sex than the equivalent contemporary Hollywood movie (or even most indies), while also only having about as much sex as any number of legit movies from the heyday of in-name-only Emmanuelle ripoffs. In terms of explicitness, this goes only slightly further than something like Sliver or Single White Female; the difference is that it’s not suffused with murders and intrigue. That’s a mixed blessing; the neo-noir plotting of so many erotic thrillers keep them humming in between the nudity; Emmanuelle doesn’t have the same drive. That makes it read less like an exploitation movie than you’d expect from a movie about a gal having half a dozen different varieties of hotel sex. So, again: mixed blessing. But at least it ends well, especially for its conflicted heroine. You have to admire a sex movie that finishes with an actual climax – as if preparing for you to abruptly flip channels.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Emmanuelle on HBO Max