How Emmanuelle made soft porn chic – but excused rape

The notorious (and profitable) 1974 erotic thriller has been remade – and is stirring up queasy memories of a franchise best forgotten

Asked to buzz in with the most successful example of a 1970s Euro-arty softcore porn film, most quizzers would surely plump for Emmanuelle (1974), and with good reason. They are unlikely to remember the existence of Audrey Diwan’s contemporary remake, which has just premiered to stinging reviews at the San Sebastian Film Festival, having been rejected by both Cannes and Venice.
The probability is nil of Diwan’s film, which has been called “aloof”, “chilly” and “anticlimactic”, coming anywhere close to the notoriety of Just Jaeckin’s 1974 version, which was none of those things. 
This French production was a cash-in on the whole idea of X-rated “erotic drama”. It was a genre which had just been legitimised by the risqué success of a celebrated art film, Last Tango in Paris (1972), and had a lot of titillating mileage left in it – and profit.
The taboo-smashing Last Tango had achieved extraordinary acclaim, especially for the men involved, Marlon Brando and Bernardo Bertolucci, who were both Oscar-nominated. The risk Emmanuelle took, then – or the fraud it perpetrated, depending on your point of view – was its lip-smacking focus on a woman’s voyage of erotic discovery. 
The source was a novel by Thai-born Marayat Rollet-Andriane, which was first distributed around France with no author’s name in 1959, then later republished under the nom-de-plume “Emmanuelle Arsan” in 1967, before being translated into English in 1971. It followed the 19-year-old wife of a French engineer, as she moves to Bangkok, forsaking her marriage vows before she has even landed, by having two anonymous sexual encounters on the flight over.
As shaped in the script by Jean-Louis Richard, Emmanuelle’s adventures in Thailand would go on to involve several lesbian dalliances, before she tumbles into the thrall of an older lover named Mario (played by Artaudian theatre veteran Alain Cuny), who twice compels her to have sex with young Thai men. 
The censors, not to mention critics of the day, were fairly appalled by what some of these sequences entailed, but audiences lapped it all up. In France, where the film first came out in June 1974, it achieved an amazing 8.9m admissions – more than The Great Escape (1963), West Side Story (1961), or even Amélie (2001). It ran in one cinema on the Champs-Élysées for some 13 years.
International distributors were quick to notice this bonanza, and would sell the film heavily on the image of its star, the 21-year-old Dutch model Sylvia Kristel, who had in fact auditioned for Maria Schneider’s role in Last Tango. One famous poster had Kristel topless in a woven peacock chair, playing with a heavy string of pearls. Another, against a black background, was simply a side view of her open mouth, glossy with lipstick, with the words “X was never like this” dangling just above it.
Building an entire ad campaign around the promise of tasteful fellatio was brazen, but it worked. Emmanuelle was huge in Japan, earning $8.7m, and proved a redemptive hit for Columbia Pictures in the USA, helping them recover after Lost Horizon (1973) flopped. It was also the #4 hit at the UK box office for 1974. Demand for Kristel to continue in the role was instant, and Emmanuelle 2 followed in 1975, with the third (1977) and fourth (1984) films again featuring her, until she ducked out of the series, which eventually ran to seven films. 
Each new instalment had a different director, invariably male, and usually ex-fashion photographers. Jaeckin refused to do more than one, and only Kristel was the linking factor. She claimed to have got the role completely by accident – walking through the wrong door when she thought she was auditioning for a commercial, then being asked by Jaeckin to disrobe. Unlike Jane Fonda, who had a major career waiting on the other side of her sexy writhing in Barbarella (1968), Kristel’s association with this one part would define her forever, hindering all attempts at later respectability.
“This role I had imagined as a springboard shrank me for good,” she wrote in her 2007 memoir, Undressing Emmanuelle. “My body was more interesting than my words.”
Emmanuelle fever dominated the mid-1970s, to the point where it was spoofed, inevitably, in (sic) Carry On Emmannuelle (1978), which cunningly misspelled her name to avoid copyright infringement. The French series became a top-shelf staple in video stores through the 1980s, and would gain renewed popularity on late-night Channel 5. Taking video and DVD into account, the accumulated revenue from the first film alone is guessed to be about $650m.
Even on release, the film prompted debate on whether Emmanuelle herself was clearly the victim of exploitation – a blatant male fantasy figure – or in some way mistress of her own destiny. Variety’s 1974 review clearly picked a side: “more a come-on for the civil service than for femme lib”, it suggested.
Kristel did understand one reason why her vehicle had such a whopping impact in Asia, where, after all, it was set. “Japanese feminists were rather delighted with the film,” she told this newspaper in 2007, “because they thought Emmanuelle was dominant, just because of this one scene where she climbs on top of her husband. That was the moment when all the Japanese women stood up and applauded.”
Against that, everyone had to set the dubiously racialised crux of her sexual awakening, which involves two different scenes where she’s forced to have sex with young Thai men who don’t speak. Two of them rape her in an opium den while Mario looks on, and then she is given to the victor of an underground boxing match, in full public view, after licking the sweat off his forehead.
Kristel tried to argue with Jaeckin that rape was no way to present the heroine’s liberation, and that there was no way it could be pleasurable. “It was very hard to explain that to a male director,” she later explained. “He said, ‘Yes, but it’s in the book.’ It was a very humiliating scene, and very difficult for me.” In a separate interview she remarked that the Thai men “were not actors” and “I really had to fight for my life there”.
These days, it won’t do to wave this part of the film aside and simply dismiss Emmanuelle as harmless softcore erotica with Vaseline on the lens. The veneer of the film may be gauzy, chic, déshabillé, but these scenes expose a meretricious underbelly. They’re too wildly uncomfortable, too pained – as is quite evident from Kristel’s protesting performance – and impossible to square with what Jaeckin claimed he wanted the film to be: “something soft and beautiful with a nice story”. 
Just as Last Tango’s reputation has been rocked by the revelations about Schneider’s lack of consent while filming the infamous butter scene, Kristel’s disagreement with Jaeckin is inseparable from this film, and it’s all his fault. It’s not tasteful, but tasteless. The BBFC in 1974, under James Ferman, took one look at the opium den rape and insisted that it would have to be cut, as would the shot in a seedy club where a contortionist is shown inhaling a cigarette with her vagina – which, incidentally, Jaeckin says the producers added without his knowledge. (Both scenes have since been reinstated, using the logic that they’re too absurd/dated/tacky to corrupt anybody.)
It would later be alleged that the real author of the novel was not Marayat Rollet-Andriane after all, but her husband, the diplomat Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane. Frankly, this tracks. Only in the 1960s and 1970s could such dirty-mac-brigade entertainment be justified so successfully as “a woman’s voyage of discovery”, when it’s men who seem to be constantly at the tiller – and buying the tickets – while Emmanuelle is effectively tied to the mast for their delectation. 
“It was the right time,” Kristel would shrug late in life, dishing out the faintest of faint praise. The wrong time for Emmanuelle is basically ever since.
3/5