In Lars von Trier’s erotic opus Nymphomaniac, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s sex-obsessed Joe defines the erotic as “about saying yes.” It is a definition that lends itself to indulgence, the very sin Joe believes has rendered her body incapable of experiencing pleasure. It is, too, an idea that dangerously flirts with equating willingness to sensuality, a truth Audrey Diwan quickly debunks with her new feature, Emmanuelle.
The French director follows her striking Golden Lion winner Happening with a modernised take on Emmanuelle Arsan’s eponymous novel from 1967 which which has provided fodder for a truckload of increasingly-less competent adaptations across the last half-century. In Diwan’s reimagining, the titular character is no longer a barely adult ingenue, but Noémie Merlant’s 35-year-old luxury hotel inspector, sent to Hong Kong to find dirt on a pristinely-suited manager played by a scarce Naomi Watts.
Far be it from Emmanuelle to abstain from mixing business and pleasure, she thus spends her days circulating the luxurious Rosefield Palace, half prowling and half appraising. She times how long it takes a waitress to fetch a glass of sparkling water with the same nonchalant effectiveness it takes her to land a threesome with a couple by the rooftop bar and exchanges as few words with a concierge as she does with the stranger with whom she had casual sex in an airplane bathroom.
This impersonal sense of apathy permeates the entirety of Diwan’s half-hearted affair, with the blasé Emmanuelle perking up only when in the presence of two opposing forces: chatty escort Zelda (Chacha Huang) and mysterious hotel client Kei (Will Sharpe). With the subtlety of a rusty hammer, Diwan gives the sex worker a battered copy of Wuthering Heights and the elusive man the job of an engineer specialising in dams — a woman who sells affection carrying a book about the selfishness of love and an emotionally stunted man whose job is to erect physical barriers. How clever.
Such lack of nuance would be more easily forgivable if this erotic drama was, well, erotic. Or even fun. Alas, Emmanuelle plays out with unmovable frigidity, a sanitised look at sex that features plenty of nudity and a handful of fairly explicit sex scenes but is as successful in eliciting arousal as an airport security check. Shot as languidly as a perfume ad (and the prominent feature of a certain smartphone would lead one to believe it might actually be an ad), this is a film that renders lifeless the intoxicating, labyrinthine Hong Kong of Wong Kar Wai.
If the city lacks a beating pulse, so do the people in the frame. Diwan’s gaze is aimless, puzzlingly more preoccupied with scattered objects within the fortified walls of this liminal space than the curves and edges of the bodies of her characters. Backless silk dresses make evident the contour of perky breasts and long limbs sparkle with droplets of water against the soft light of a spa and yet none of it feels sensual, the suggestion of eroticism proving a flimsy foundation for eroticism itself. That a filmmaker who previously displayed such a deep understanding of the pleasures and burdens of the female body is behind this tepid exercise in desire is a great shock — and an even bigger shame.
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