What’s so titillating about Hong Kong? Certain cities have sex appeal, of course — it’s easier to imagine a ménage à trois in Paris than Cologne or a dangerous tryst in Palermo than Scranton. Industrial cities that flaunt efficiency are about as sexy as a spreadsheet, no matter their relative wealth. Meanwhile, even the poorest beach towns, especially the ones that already offer a robust international tourism industry, can implicitly advertise their seedier areas as sites for anonymous, risky fun. The original Emmanuelle (both novel and the 1974 Just Jaeckin film) used Bangkok, its reputation not yet poisoned by the implications of underage sex tourism, as a warm-weather site for guilt-free sexual exploration. As the titular character wandered further from French speakers and safe tourist spots, the softcore sex became kinkier — a structure that mirrored the gay hardcore film LA Plays Itself two years earlier. But could Hong Kong, a city with a more storied, industrial, colonial past, match this admittedly Orientalist allure Bangkok once held? Audrey Diwan must think so, as her recent reboot of Emmanuelle relocates the best-selling erotic series to a city now doomed to be seen as merely a bland hub for international business, with its storied personality just out of reach.
But for the first hour of Emmanuelle’s runtime, our new Emmanuelle never leaves the safety of the luxury hotel. 2024’s Emmanuelle is no longer merely the wife of a successful diplomat, but is a business success herself: here, she explores the premises of Hong Kong’s Rosefield Palace (shot at the St. Regis Hong Kong) to run something of a quality audit on behalf of the company that owns it. She’s good at her job, and, given that her role is akin to a powerful critic, she’s treated with luxurious amenities and attention by the hotel’s manager, Margot (Naomi Watts). She’s also given full access to the hotel’s grounds and security room (monitored by Anthony Wong, playing the film’s closest approximation to a transgressive character called “The Eye”), where she gives in to a voyeuristic curiosity about the sex lives of the clientele. Two visitors intrigue her more than others: Zelda (Chacha Huang), who inevitably teaches Emmanuelle about the joys of being watched, and Kei (Will Sharpe), one of the hotel’s prized FITs (frequent international travelers), whose mysterious disappearances from the grounds prove most alluring. Sure enough, Emmanuelle does eventually follow Kei, leaving the safe European trappings of the Rosefield for the shadowy Kowloon mahjong parlors, food stalls, and clubs. By the time she finds what she’s looking for, the film ends.
Director Audrey Diwan has boasted that she adapted Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel without having seen the original Jaeckin version or any of the dozens of loose sequels (and even an Atari/MS-DOS game) that followed. Though the series boasts more talent than its reputation might imply — arthouse favorite Alain Cuny in Emmanuelle ‘74, Cahiers du Cinéma co-founder Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in Emmanuelle 3, Walerian Borowczyk in the director’s chair for Emmanuelle 5, and Jean Rollin helming parts of Emmanuelle 6 — it’s hard to imagine the original title alone being praised for its aesthetic merits; so Diwan’s proposed fresh, feminist reimagining of the source material was welcome news. But, the result is a risk-free series of dalliances around a cold hotel that resembles an episode of White Lotus drained of its tension. Indeed, the show bears at least some implicit comparison to the film, as it also features rich people’s affairs in luxury hotels, but also demands an explicit comparison in the casting of Will Sharpe, having walked into this shoot right off the set of White Lotus season 2, as our enigmatic traveler. Unlike the show, however, the sex of Emmanuelle bears no consequences, and the seductive mysteries of its characters are bathetic dead ends.
Granted, the novel’s depiction of fellating a boy and the original adaptation’s foray into rape fantasy are best avoided for a more enlightened contemporary audience, but Diwan’s completely liberated modern-day Emmanuelle seems to seek somnambulant pleasure rather than hedonistic adventure. “Tolerated, but not authorized,” croons Emmanuelle to Zelda as she explains the hotel’s policy of shacking up before their mutual masturbation sequence (sans the Paul Newman picture of the first adaptation). “Tolerated, but not authorized,” shoots back the jealous Margot to Emmanuelle after discovering their session in the pool shack. Of course, “tolerated, but not authorized” still effectively means “allowed,” thus removing even the hint of excitement from these casual encounters. Emmanuelle spends most of the runtime in quiet montage sequences, treating the hotel itself as an erotic object. In one, she gently touches a stairway railing in a manner befitting both routine inspection and cruising. In another, she grants herself access to Kei’s unused hotel room in order to taste his bath water and lie naked in wait. These scenes are shot with an interesting play of soft- and deep-focus, and they’re by far the most provocative images in Emmanuelle. By the time the film realizes it needs to go somewhere, the only meaningful place to go is away from the hotel and into the exotic streets of Hong Kong.
But even here, Diwan plays safely with her Orientalist tropes, ones more likely to cause offense due to laziness than overt stereotypes. The forbidden, exclusive Fenwick bar, described to Emmanuelle as a place where rich men give expensive call girls as many diamonds as they can swallow, turns out to simply be a mahjong parlor for cheaters, just as Kei himself turns out really to only be there for work, just as he always said. A final sequence combines the titillation of having sex with exotic foreign men and the previous pleasure of being watched by having Kei act as a cuckold translator between Emmanuelle and a Cantonese stranger in the backroom of a club. But even this clever sequence is undercut by Sharpe’s monotonous mumbling that stands in for what should be carnal purrs. By extension, Emmanuelle itself mumbles rather than purrs as it seeks to be such an inoffensive update to Arsan’s novel that it rids itself entirely of all evidence of seduction.
DIRECTOR: Audrey Diwan; CAST: Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts, Will Sharpe, Jamie Campbell Bower; DISTRIBUTOR: Decal; IN THEATERS: June 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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