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‘Emmanuelle’ Review: Notionally Revisionist Remake of the Softcore Classic Is One Big Anti-Climax
Audrey Diwan's chilly erotic drama 'Emmanuelle' is in thrall to the sleekest bed linens you've ever seen, and weirdly loath to get them dirty.
Mirroring the original by taking the eponymous French heroine on a supposedly erotic voyage of discovery to the Far East, Diwan and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski’s first modernizing order of business is to subtract Emmanuelle’s husband from proceedings and give her a career instead — as a quality control surveyor for a luxury hotel chain, allowing her to do as little actual work as possible in a cushy leisure environment where a high-end mattress is always close at hand. Still, in the absence of baser sensual spectacle, it’s something of a relief when Diwan drops in an extended setpiece around a sudden tropical cyclone that disrupts the smooth, soundless workings of the hotel — and, crucially, gives DP Laurent Tangy something to handsomely shoot other than buttery ambient lighting and bedsheets so pristine you could perform open-heart surgery on them. Merlant, a long way from the sensory and emotional specificities of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” is too earnest a presence to bring any lascivious camp edge to lines like, “I got a whiff of his scent — a bit peppery.” Indeed, none of the actors exhibits a clear understanding of how to play material at once absurdly banal and wholly resistant to its own comic potential, mostly arriving at the same temperature of disengaged froideur.
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