Emmanuelle, review: About as sexy as a mouse mat

Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle - Alamy

After around 15 minutes, I realised the new Emmanuelle was going to be about as sexy as a mouse mat, and after a further 15 I started to wonder if that might be the idea. This remake of the notorious 1974 French X-rated romp had its Asian premiere this week at the Tokyo Film Festival – a homecoming of sorts, since the first was particularly popular in Japan, where it outgrossed both The Man with the Golden Gun and The Godfather Part II.

Yet it’s hard to imagine many nations being titillated and/or scandalised by this refrigerated 21st-century rethink. At least it’s good news for the Gen-Z contingent who complain there’s too much sex in films: this is absolutely an Emmanuelle for them.

The obvious approach would have been to make Emmanuelle ’24 a self-empowerment get-it-girl parable – and to their credit, director Audrey Diwan (of the 2021 Venice prizewinner Happening) and her co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski have not done this, though it’s not clear what their alternative take has to offer instead. Starring Noémie Merlant, it unfolds in a ludicrous haute-lifestyle-mag parallel dimension, in which every aspect of life – not just sex – has become slinkily anonymous.

Our new Emmanuelle is a quality controller for a chain of luxury hotels, and has been dispatched to their Hong Kong outpost to find an excuse to sack its manager Margot (Naomi Watts), who has fallen from grace at HQ.

Emmanuelle’s job consists of being fawned over by staff like a visiting alien dignitary, then recording terse voice memos in which she rates her experience on a three-colour scale, from green to red. To unwind afterwards, she has sex with whoever’s around – which in her circles means they tend to look as if they’ve just glided out of a copy of GQ. One typical assignation has her plunging into a threesome with a young married couple no more than five seconds after the husband says to Emmanuelle in the lobby bar: “So, I gather you’re French.”

Yet these two are but an amuse-bouche (and the rest) for what Emmaneulle hopes will be the main course: Kei (Will Sharpe), a globe-trotting civil engineer and regular guest about whom the hotel chain knows tantalisingly little. He introduces himself as “a Frequent International Traveller – FIT”,  but doesn’t seem to mean it as a come-on. In fact, he’s an entirely sexless figure, which for Emmanuelle either marks him out as a curio or the ultimate conquest.

You might imagine this libido gap would provide ample fuel for a juicy (and raunchy) character study. But the film features oddly little psychological grappling – and of the physical sort, even less. Indeed, of the few sex scenes here, the conventionally hottest by far has Emmanuelle writhing on her bed alone, taking nude selfies while caressing her body with an ice cube. (To paraphrase Woody Allen, don’t knock it: it’s sex with someone you love.) Even a hook-up in a maintenance shed with Chacha Huang’s Emily Brontë-quoting escort fails to hit the heights, wuthering or otherwise.

The result is an empty film about emptiness, and therefore doubly depressing. Note that it ends on a hopeful note of sorts: the film literally climaxes with an orgasm, albeit one so decorous it could have appeared in an advert for Cadbury’s Flake. Cinema-goers, however, will have to find satisfaction elsewhere.

Cert TBC, 107 min. Screening at the Tokyo Film Festival; UK release TBC