3/5 stars
The opening movie at this year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival in Spain, Emmanuelle is a chic contemporary take on the cult 1974 soft-core porn film that starred Sylvia Kristel as the wife of a diplomat who travels to Bangkok for some erotic adventures.
Relocated to Hong Kong, where it was partly shot, this reboot is the first movie directed by French filmmaker Audrey Diwan since she made Happening, the stirring abortion drama that took the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021.
Episodic by nature, the film stars Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) in the title role as a French-couture-clad high-flyer who works for a group that owns luxury hotel chains.
When we first see her, she is silently engaged in a tryst with a business traveller in the first-class bathroom of an airliner. Both coolly detached and adventurous, Emmanuelle as played by Merlant appears inscrutable and almost unknowable.
“You seem to be a stickler for the rules but you don’t always follow them,” she is told.