Emmanuelle travels from Paris to Bangkok to join her husband, diplomat Jean, who tells her he doesn't want to treat her as possession and allows her to have freedom. Emmenuelle thus decide to explore her sexuality. She meets Bee and goes away with her in a jeep, to a waterfall, where Emmanuelle has a lesbian encounter with Bee. However, afterwards, Bee is bored of her and rejects her. Emmenuelle meets with the older gentleman Mario who takes her to an opium bar and watches a Thai man have sex with her. In a boxing match, the winning champion, a Thai man, also gets to have sex with Emmanuelle, while Mario watches, but doesn't have sex with her. Emmanuelle watches herself in the mirror.
"Emmanuelle" obtained an almost cult reputation and helped erotic cinema gain significance, but looking at it from today's perspective, it is lacking not only artistic, but also erotic merit. It just isn't that erotic in the first place. Sylvia Kristel, with her short tomboyish hair, doesn't seem that attractive, but the bigger problem is that the story doesn't know what to do with her character, her exploration of her own sexuality, obvious in the ending that lacks a point, a conclusion of sorts, and thus feels vague and incomplete. Emancipation and sexual liberation cannot quite be deducted from the finale where a Thai man rapes Emmanuelle in an opium bar nor when a Thai man winning in a boxing match "wins" to take Emmanuelle from behind. Still, the exotic locations of Bangkok are interesting and different, and some of the dialogue is intermittently really well written. For instance, during a massage, Jean tells to a friend the reason why he married Emmanuelle: "You must have married her for her beauty, though?" - "I married her beacuse no woman I know enjoys making love more, or does it as well". When Emmanuelle is perplexed as to why she should have sex with the old gentleman Mario, her friend explains it to her: "When someone still makes love at his age, it becomes pure poetry". One almost wishes the director would have taken a more honest, emotional and psychological depiction of Emmanuelle, since these two sentences show the story had potential to be more. Instead, it's just random, isolated and disjointed episodes, with very little sex, that lead nowhere. The sequence where Emmanuelle has sex with two passangers on a plane, while all the other passangers are asleep, is almost comical and naive, for instance. One iconic scene is legendary, though: Marie-Ange sits and masturbates while watching the photo of Paul Newman in a magazine hanging from her leg, which is an example of almost sophisticated erotic touch. Too bad the rest of the movie cannot follow it.
Grade:+
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