Emmanuelle (1974)

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Sylvia Kristel is a plausible candidate for lead in a lush soft-core porn flick. She has candid blue eyes and her even features come together successfully without being staggeringly beautiful. Her figure, reassuringly feminine, is rangy and graceless. She seems to be hunched over most of the time. Her breasts are modest and her limbs are rather shapeless. The thing is, though, that she slings this chassis slowly around with such careless ease that she seems to be sexier than she is. She doesn't just walk. She minces along. And if she sits down and props her crossed heels on a table she allows her robe to fall open, not because she's been directed to do it but because she doesn't care if anyone glimpses any forbidden areas. The dubbed voice doesn't do her justice. It's babyish and breathless where it should be throaty and mellow.Alain Cluny had me pretty much convinced as the secretly desperate intellectual in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," but I swear he doesn't do it for me here. I can't understand why any woman would place herself in his hands in order to be opened up to experience. The guy's head has all the salient features of a perfect cube. If any women find his face appealing, then I can be certain I'm not a woman trapped in a man's body because I thought he was ugly as hell.The plot is a hackneyed male fantasy. Ordinary, bourgeois housewife is encouraged to find sexual adventures outside the marital boudoir. Initiated into certain rituals that expand her mind. You can find the same theme in works of some circumstance, like Bunuel's "Belle de Jour" and in unembarrassed crap like "Deep Throat." The movie was shot in Thailand and on the Seychelles. We get a tourist's eye view of the people and scenery. All the white folks are terrifically rich and live like Roman emperors. The darkies are happily subservient and will do anything they're asked to do. The girls are all cute too. One performs a trick with a cigarette on stage that I saw done in the Richmond Theater in San Francisco. Everything seems clean, even the opium dens, and picturesque and inviting. Alfred Hitchcock could have shot this movie if he'd been a dirty old man.Not that this is straight pornography. No, it soft porn, so there are lots of candles and arty compositions and tinkling wind chimes. The sex scenes are neither pompous nor believable. They're just there because this is a soft-core porn movie. Of course it was ground breaking in 1974. Everyone flocked to see it and it made a bundle, leading to a dozen or more sequels. I think there's an "Emmanuelle Meets the Seven Dwarfs" in pre-production. At the same time we have to note that this is a FRENCH soft-core porn movie, so it's not all in-your-face and breasts like basketballs, the way an American soft-core movie would be. Instead we have interesting "philosophical" tripe."Chastity is a lack of generosity." "Love, to be real, has got to be unnatural." "I'm a real woman now. I spit on the others." "Love between couples should be outlawed." If you can get through that kind of pretentious dialog you're rewarded by seeing Sylvia Krystel taken in half a dozen different ways, including from behind by a sweaty Thai fighter still wearing his boxing gloves. (She was the prize.) Actually there's more female nudity than in today's feature films. The moral pendulum seems to be cycling back towards puritanism.

The French love Emmanuelle. Apparently Emmanuelle is the most popular movie ever shown in France. Yet another reason to doubt the taste of the French, if you ask me.I like me a good naked lady movie as much as the next guy, but even so Emmanuelle annoys me plenty. It's dreary, plot less, pretentious and more than a little sick.What Emmanuelle does have is Sylvia Kristel, who was 21 when it was made. Kristel is a Dutchwoman who is said to have an I.Q. of 160. This actually could be true. I've seen her in television interviews, and she speaks perfectly grammatical English, with only a slight accent. Emmanuelle was shot in French, and apparently Kristel's French is virtually flawless too. She can't act any better than Daniel Day-Lewis's right foot, but she's certainly a gifted linguist.And beautiful? Forget about it. Take the beauty quotients of Geena Davis and Demi Moore, add them together, and multiply by 5. Plus, she's sort of childlike, which is wierdly appealing in the star of a sex movie.

This film is loosely based on the erotic art novel by Emmanuelle Arsan.The fact that it was directed by Just Jaeckin means that it is the best of the Emmanuelle series, and makes the others look like mere skin flicks, which I think they probably are anyway.Sadly, in Britain, the censors, in an effort to save the British public from themselves, have hacked a few scenes out of it, including a "smoking" scene in a nightclub and a rape scene towards the end of the film.Sylvia Kristel seems ideally cast as the protagoniste. Others have called her innocent, but this is not the case: she is not so innocent, but becomes even less so, as her adventures increase her learning and experience.Compared with the novel, the sam-lo scenes are not so well done, and the Mario character is a bit tacky, otherwise the film is well done. Emmanuelle's encounter with Bee is better than the book. Not so good are one or two of the simulated sex scenes; they look pretty phony.This film was exceedingly popular at the time it was released, and has lasted the test of time, even if some of the clothes have not.

Emmanuelle, a "girl" in her 20s, played by Sylvia Kristel, is an authentic and plausible character, who gives you the impression that she could in fact be experiencing the many erotic adventures - amongst them many lesbian encounters – which she embarks upon in Thailand. Maybe it helps to point out that Sylvia Kristel, born in 1952 in a small town in the Netherlands, was brought up in a very strict Calvinist family and went on to study English, in hopes of becoming a teacher, before she ran away from home, giving up all she had had, defying all of her relatives and friends, and started working as a model from the 1970s on in Amsterdam. In her first Emmanuelle film (a French erotic film), she acts the role of her life, becoming famous immediately in France, and soon thereafter in the world. She plays a young married lady, the wife of an ambassador, living in Thailand with her husband. There, she experiences many erotic adventures with and without him. The intriguing fact is that her husband encourages her to do so; he would like her to "improve" her sexuality and gain experience, ultimately learning to differentiate between love and sex. Sylvia Kristel plays Emmanuelle with such authenticity, and with the vulnerability and timidness, only a young woman of her age, lacking sexual experience, could have. In summary, she doesn't give you the impression that she is doing yet another boring porno- flick, where she is forced to do "some acting", in order for the movie to HAVE a plot, other than gynecological nudity scenes, or 3-minute "sex-adventures". The countless sequels to this first Emmanuelle film certainly don't measure up to the artistic standard - or even to the erotic standard - of this one. If you are willing to forget that it seems unrealistic that a young lady sleeps with other women and men, while her husband encourages her to do so, you are in for a really sensual and - for guys, a very realistic - account of what an unreserved, 20 year old, bi-curious girl might really experience in Thailand; the country of erotic massages and exotic climate.