Stream It Or Skip It?

Oh boy: Emmanuelle (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) is a modern remake of the 1974 X-rated softcore quasi-classic about a French woman taking a Far East vacation of sexual liberation. As directed by a gentleman named Just Jaeckin – is it OK to snigger at that? – the film adapted Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel, and spawned multiple sequels into the early ’90s. The franchise was dormant until director Audrey Diwan followed up her highly acclaimed abortion drama Happening with an Emmanuelle reboot, starring Noemie Merlant of Portrait of a Lady on Fire fame. So we’ve got a fresh filmmaking voice, a talented star and a compelling new context for an erotic drama that includes a moviegoing audience thirsty for horny films. And our only question is, what the hell happened?

The Gist: An airplane. To Hong Kong. First class all the way. Emmanuelle’s (Merlant) very sexy knees are center-frame. She calls over the flight attendant, asks for lip balm. It’s so dry in here! Two adjacent men male-gaze Emmanuelle. One of them gets her silent message in reply. She elegantly rises from her seat, glides to the surprisingly roomy first-class restroom and waits for him to join her. She lifts her dress. He unzips. Bump bump bump. Shall we interpret her facial expression as she leans against the vanity, her head tilted back? Don’t mind if I do: It seems more MEH than OHH BABY. An itch only partially scratched.

Emmanuelle arrives at a hotel that has more stars in its rating than the American flag. You can’t afford it. Trust me. First thing she does is take a bath, and while she’s shaving various body parts – please note the bruise on her hip from the plane ride – room service arrives and the guy gets caught peeking. “I like to put myself at the guest’s disposal,” he says. I bet he does. Everyone kowtows to Emmanuelle. She meets with the manager, Margot (Naomi Watts). She attends a meeting with management. She drops by the security surveillance office. She sits by the pool, orders a drink, times how long it takes to arrive, watches as a young bikini’d woman bends over and the guy next to her takes a good long look, then follows her down a path to a shed hidden among some palms. Curious. See, Emmanuelle works for the parent company of the Sexytimes Hotel, and she’s here to evaluate its, if you’ll pardon the phrase, ins and outs. She records voice notes, assigning various services a color corresponding to their quality. Green is good. Red is not good.

How about that threesome Emmanuelle has with a couple from the hotel bar? Is that green? Yellow? Some shade of pink or chartreuse? She doesn’t record any voice notes for that, nor does she try to hide her proclivities. She follows the bikini’d woman, Zelda (Chacha Huang), to the shed, and let’s just say they share a moment, and become friends. But who she really wants is Kei (Will Sharpe), probably because he doesn’t immediately start pulling off one of her many, many backless dresses with his eyes. He was the other guy on the plane, by the way, so he asks her about her restroom encounter, and she goes into so much detail. So, so much detail. Like, wowzers. Hey, by the way, does this movie have an actual story? Well, Emmanuelle’s bosses want her to find a reason to fire Margot. And she wants to bag and devour Kei like gummi worms in the bulk-candy aisle. It could fit on an ant’s postage stamp, this plot.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Portrait of a Lady Without Underwire.

Performance Worth Watching: Is this one of those movies where we can declare the setting to be a “character”? Because it has more personality than these, if you’ll pardon the phrase, stiffs.

Memorable Dialogue: “I caught a whiff of his scent – peppery.” – Emmanuelle

Sex and Skin: Plenty! If I went into detail, I’d be in spoiler territory, because the movie exists to reveal its small handful of scenes erotiques.

Our Take: Note I said “small handful.” If you’ll pardon the phrase. Within the context of Emmanuelle’s sparse plot, that might not be nearly enough. This is a zero-stakes drama populated with a bunch of zeroes, and any attempt to engage with it intellectually or emotionally is akin to dividing by zero. This is a dour, humorless nothing of a movie that does little more than meander through the spotless halls and suites of a hotel with a thick, glossy veneer of high class and a swampy sub-basement of LUST — then shows us sex scenes with a remarkable lack of heat. See, Zelda is a sex worker who participates in the hotel’s unadvertised amenity, which is “tolerated but not authorized.” I believe it’s awkwardly symbolized by a storm that blows away all the tarps in the hotel’s new wing that’s under construction – oh no, what happens if everything gets wet?

I believe Emmanuelle is supposed to have a rich, succulent, unspoken inner life. Teensy bits of it emerge via Nobody Talks Like This dialogue that’s so clumsy, it makes Baby Huey look like Baryshnikov. Short story made even shorter: I think she’s searching for a bigger O than her regular O? Emmanuelle and Kei’s exchanges, despite their racy content, might as well occur in a walk-in freezer. The original Emmanuelle was about liberation, and evident by the 2.8 scenes with Watts, playing a perfectly competent runner of hotels, what this Emmanuelle apparently should liberate herself from is the unseen authority of her soul-squashing employer. Her character arc is an old speed bump: What she really needs to do in order to feel the mighty erogenous truth, see, is get out of the exquisitely sanitized hotel bubble and breathe some unprocessed air. Ironically, Diwan failed to pump a breathable atmosphere into this lifeless movie.

Our Call: Enough phrase-pardoning: This Emmanuelle sucks and blows and never reaches a satisfying release. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.