Sex kitten Emmanuelle returns as a sad product of modern sexuality
It was also a hit, reaching number three at the US box office that year. Numerous sequels and knock-offs followed, while the original continued to be shown at a cinema in the Champs Elysees for 13 years.
Why did it work? Emmanuelle was based on a trashy novel, first published in 1959, by a pseudonymous 'Emmanuelle Arsan' who later turned out to be a French diplomat stationed in Thailand, presumably with time on his hands. It wasn't a good film. It was atrociously dubbed. But it had high production values, exotic cultural notes, some solemn theorising about the nature of the erotic (giving it a drop of European seriousness) and winsome Sylvia Kristel – a Dutch model who wanted to break into acting – under the camera's constant caress.
Emmanuelle 's endless simulated sexual encounters look astonishingly cheesy now. They are also unmistakably a male fantasy: a woman's supposed sensual awakening entirely orchestrated by the men around her. At first, she fiddles with other trophy wives, before being taken up by an elderly roué who steers her to an opium den where he invites a couple of patrons to rape her. Kristel argued against this scene, which now looks as dreadful as it sounds, but director Just Jaeckin said they had to do it because it was in the book.
He said later he just wanted to make 'something soft and beautiful, with a nice story'. While Kristel would star in three sequels, he refused to make another one. Emmanuelle was not the springboard either had imagined; Kristel was never taken seriously as an actor, while Jaeckin's career as a photographer was permanently stunted by his brush with the raincoat brigade.
Given this history – not to mention the convulsions in gender politics of the intervening 50 years – it was certainly a surprise when Emmanuelle was revived by French producers, this time to be directed by the impeccably feminist Audrey Diwan. It was a bold idea. Diwan won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 with The Happening, a powerful film about a young woman seeking an abortion in provincial France in the early '60s. She came to Emmanuelle, she says, from a position of relative ignorance. To this day, she has seen only 20 minutes of Jaeckin's Vaseline fantasy.
'I clearly understood this wasn't made for me as an audience, like I was not invited,' she said at last September's San Sebastian Film Festival, where her film screened on opening night. She was intrigued, however, by the idea of discussing the erotic from a woman's point of view, still more by the challenge of finding a cinematic language that would make that possible for modern audiences.
'The movie of the '70s was strong because it was about opening the frame. Whereas I want to restrain the frame. Now everyone can see everything, does it still work? That was the first thing.' She read the book, then let the character – or whatever Emmanuelle might become – sit with her.
In the script she eventually wrote with Rebecca Zlotowski, Emmanuelle is no longer a trophy wife. Now played by Noemie Merlant, she has a high-flying job – literally – visiting and evaluating luxury hotels, where armies of service workers ensure that every detail of life in the bubble is perfect. Her destination is not languorous Thailand but bustling Hong Kong, where she is tasked with finding a reason to sack the Rosefield Hotel's manager Margot (Naomi Watts).
On the way, in an echo of the opening scene in the first film, she has sex with a stranger in the plane's toilet. The original Emmanuelle declared herself only interested in pursuing pleasure. In Diwan's film, she grits her teeth through the act, then returns to her seat with an expression of dull disappointment. The former sex kitten is now a picture of emptiness.
Merlant, who is most immediately recognisable as the feisty painter in Portrait of a Woman on Fire, says she immediately recognised herself in the new Emmanuelle. 'At the beginning of the movie, you have this woman who did not feel anything belonged to her, including her body,' she says. 'She doesn't get pleasure; she tries to make others satisfied. She is a robot. For me, it makes a lot of sense, so I said yes.'
Merlant started modelling when she was 17. On her first job, she was sexually assaulted; when she told her agents what had happened, she was told it was her fault for not refusing clearly enough. This must be adult life, she decided; she would have to protect herself. Like Emmanuelle, she says, she shut down.
'For years I couldn't cry any more. It's like the only place I could cry was when I was shooting in films. And laugh. Like I could be alive only when I was shooting.'
She played another role in everyday life. 'The role society gave me when I was young, the role I played for others, for men, not for myself.' What she wanted in reality, she says, eluded her. 'We have been used for men's pleasure for centuries,' she says. 'We don't even know what we want. That's what I felt. With the #MeToo movement, I realised that things were not right.' Emmanuelle's quest is to find her way back to her own desire. ''How do I get there? It takes time and then I'm going to say what I want out loud.' This was very strong for me.'
Watching Emmanuelle drift to the toilet on the plane is Kei (The White Lotus ' Will Sharpe), a Japanese engineer whom she later meets in the hotel. He is as sexually numb as she is, but he is interested in her life; he questions her with gentle curiosity, peeling away her layers of icy control.
Like the raddled Mario in the first Emmanuelle, he introduces her to an Asian underbelly of grubby, druggy mahjong dens, a world away from the opulent artificiality of the hotel. Unlike Mario, he is not a voyeur or a sadist.
'He is here for her, he wants her to have space,' says Merlant. 'He is a listener. And, most of the time, we are not listened to.' When her Emmanuelle does say what she wants, it is as if a wall has crumbled.
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The new Emmanuelle was rejected by the bigger festivals, Cannes and Venice; when it finally had its premiere, some reviews were startlingly vicious. 'I think people are not happy to see a movie where Emmanuelle is sad and empty,' says Merlant.
Diwan says, however, that younger generations – for whom '70s nostalgia means nothing – relate strongly to the characters' loneliness. Many say they don't want to have sex at all, which she puts down to fear: they are afraid of falling short of their online images. Maybe they are as sad as Emmanuelle; at least we can talk about it.
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Sydney Morning Herald
17 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
The Age
17 hours ago
- The Age
Are the ghosts of this convent's ‘fallen women' about to be heard?
Today, the Abbotsford Convent seems like a utopian village. Children somersault on the lawns, artists labour in their studios, the sounds of Australian National Academy of Music performers practising spills out of the windows as the lowing of farm animals drifts in from the Collingwood Children's Farm next door. My memories of the convent are halcyon, comprising visits to the children's farm with my sons for vicarious first sightings of goats, cows and guinea pigs, and coffee-fuelled broadcasts from the 3MBS studios with my chamber music trio, Seraphim, alongside a wall inscribed with messages from friends, colleagues and, cringingly, our former selves. But these are brief, touristic impressions. Writer Nam Le, who occupied an artist's studio here for a decade, remembers: My studio was C2.46, on the second floor of the convent building, in its eastern (unofficial) 'Writer's Wing'. I often worked late – and was there alone after dark, visited only by the Wilson Security team. (It helped that I lived seven minutes' walk away.) During that time I felt intensely connected to the sisters, novices and postulants who had lived there since the mid-1800s. I sensed traces of their lives. And I felt intensely curious about these lives, the situations that had brought them there. After a bit of digging, I found my interest expanding to the history of the convent and the land on which it stands. This is land that is enormously significant to the Kulin Nation, whose connection to it extends back millennia. And it's also significant to the history of Melbourne, and the establishment of Victoria as a separate colony. It's a charged locus of church and state, a dense repository of heritage. And its incarnations over time – including as a convent, Magdalene asylum, farm, laundry, university, and (hard-fought-for) community space – exist simultaneously in that space, and give off compelling, even ghostly, energies. Any inhabited land is a palimpsest of human experience; but on this patch, as Nam suggests, stories are inscribed with a particular density. The longest and most significant of these is that of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, for whom Yarra Bend was an important meeting place and a traditional burial ground. Following European settlement, the Collins Street Baptist Church opened the Merri Creek Aboriginal School near Dights Falls, to cater for their children, but the Wurundjeri people were soon driven from the land, and the school closed six years later. Another chapter began with the arrival in Victoria of four Irish women from France in 1863, who purchased land for the convent and set about establishing a Magdalene asylum for the rehabilitation of penitents, or 'fallen women', whose transgressions ranged from insulting behaviour to 'being out at night with boys' to prostitution. Before long, the convent expanded to include an industrial school for neglected girls, a reformatory for 'criminal' girls, as well as an orphanage and day school. At its peak, in 1901, the Convent of the Good Shepherd was the largest charitable institution in the southern hemisphere, housing more than a thousand inmates, and boasting vegetable gardens, a poultry farm, a dairy and piggery, alongside a successful laundry business that supplied linen to some of Melbourne's finest establishments, including the Windsor Hotel. For some women, the convent represented safe harbour and companionship, but for many others – as testified by shocking submissions to parliament – it was a site of trauma and abuse. Upon admittance to the Magdalene asylum, women were stripped of their birth names and issued with the name of a saint alongside a uniform. It was a literal process of whitewashing: not only of laundry, but of self. (Small wonder such ghosts return to trouble a poet working late on the second floor.) Residents were prohibited from leaving the grounds unsupervised, and worked punishing shifts in the laundries, in which accidents with the mangler were not uncommon. But business thrived. As journalist Alan Gill recalled, 'bad girls do the best sheets'. Over the 20th century, the convent mutated further to incorporate a youth training centre and a cooking and typing school, until it was sold and then taken over by La Trobe University. A developer's plans for an apartment block and golf course prompted the formation of the Abbotsford Convent Coalition in 1997, which fought successfully for the multi-arts precinct we know today. Loading Social history tours are now offered monthly, addressing the convent's 'dense repository of heritage', while the Sisters of the Good Shepherd have faced their own reckoning. In 2018, they unveiled a memorial in the chapel's garden, comprising a steel cylinder engraved with words nominated by former residents: shame, courage, fear, dreams, friendship, forgotten, anger. Of course there is no single version of the convent's history, but a clamorous polyphony, which since 2020 has incorporated the young musicians of the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM), based at the convent as they await the refurbishment of the South Melbourne Town Hall. Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen, the academy's artistic director, stepped into the role in 2021 with a commitment to engage the musicians with community, and for the convent to be a 'laboratory' of new ways to make music. He notes the site's 'troubled history', and seeks to 'make music here in ... a relevant way, and in a way that is connected to the place'. When Jumppanen asked me to devise a musical response to the location, I approached Nam Le, who over recent years has articulated a poetic geography of Melbourne from Altona to Collingwood, and asked him to create a poem drawing on his own experience of the convent. The result was the startling and powerful Abbotsford II in the form of a 'mangled sestina'. Le describes it as a poem 'that evokes some of these ghosts – through the personal prism of my time there'. The sestina is a rigorously challenging form, whose demands themselves speak of labour – one of the poem's themes – and whose end-word repetitions evoke the resonances of history. Le's subversion of these strictures recalls the notorious mangler of the Magdalene laundries and – perhaps – the distortions of memory, as he asks: How to commemorise/ the hidden lives, the pain, the silences that remain? This year, Le presented the poem to ANAM's entire cohort of young musicians. These are 65 of Australia's most exceptional young players, but not all of them are students of poetry, and I was unsure how this would land. Their responses were electric. Over the course of the ensuing workshop, a kaleidoscopic playlist emerged, responding to the poem's themes of labour, childhood, faith and trauma, drawn from the internalised music libraries the musicians carried within them. Afterwards, Le and I worked with a smaller curatorial team – Timothy O'Malley, Tom Allen and Shelby MacRae – to winnow these suggestions into an immersive program. The result is a true act of co-creation: a collaboration across art forms and generations, incorporating improvisation, the spoken word, and repertoire from a span of more than a thousand years, ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to Australian composer Kate Moore. The ANAM musicians' own experience of this environment becomes a resonating chamber around Le's response, picking up some of the reverberations – and silences – of this charged site.
Sky News AU
2 days ago
- Sky News AU
‘A proud symbol of representation and visibility': Madame Tussauds Sydney unveils first ‘non-binary' wax figure of rocker G Flip
Aussie rocker G Flip has become the first non-binary person to be immortalised in wax by Madame Tussauds Sydney. The Melbourne-born singer and drummer, who goes by they/them pronouns, was unveiled as the latest addition to the museum on Wednesday. G Flip's waxy doppelganger is part of Madame Tussauds' music icon series and will appear alongside the likes of Kylie Minogue, Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. 'Wow, this is extremely wild. Very stoked to be made of wax and be the first non-binary wax figure in Australia,' G Flip said in a statement. 'It's an honour to be included among so many legends. I hope everyone enjoys whacking some drums with the wax version of me, apologies for the noise in advance.' While G Flip's wax figure will be on permanent display in Sydney, the real G Flip now lives in Los Angeles with their wife, Netflix star Chrisell Stause. In a press release, Madame Tussauds claimed the new statue would serve as 'historic moment' for the country's LGBTQ+ community. 'The figure also stands as a proud symbol of representation and visibility, celebrating LGBTQ+ Australians and reinforcing Madame Tussauds' commitment to showcasing diverse icons who inspire and lead with authenticity,' a spokesperson for the wax museum said. 'G Flip has revolutionised the Australian music scene with their raw talent and fearless authenticity,' Chris Harvey, Head of Operations at Madame Tussauds Sydney added. 'But beyond the music, they've become a beacon of inclusivity and self-expression. This figure celebrates both their artistry and their impact - and we're proud to welcome them to our Sydney Live! zone.' The original Madame Tussauds museum was opened in London in 1835 by French sculptor Marie Tussaud, who wowed the public with her eerily life-like creations. The Madame Tussauds brand is now owned by Merlion Entertainments, which operates over a dozen wax museums across the globe.
