His wicker chair has become iconic. Shot in Thailand for a few cents, the erotic film Emmanuelledirected by Just Jaeckin, was released in 1974 and became a phenomenon, attracting 9 million spectators in France (45 million worldwide) and crowning a new star, the actress Sylvia Kristel. In the France of Giscard, the pill and the Veil law on abortion, the discovery of pleasure by a slightly naive young woman who comes to meet her boyfriend in Bangkok embodies a symbol of sexual liberation.
The film, adapted from the eponymous book by Emmanuelle Arsan (published in 1959), remained on the Champs-Élysées for more than twelve years. Fifty years later, it is the director Audrey Diwan (The EventGolden Lion at Venice in 2021) who adapts this story to our times, with Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People’s Children) on the screenplay and Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) as Emmanuelle. From the 1970s to the MeToo movement, the change of era is drastic. How can we take hold of such an erotic myth today? How can we talk about sex, film it, in the midst of the MeToo movement and when many voices denounce the sexualization of bodies on screen?
METOO BEFORE METOO (1/3) – The angel and the big pig
The new opus logically distances itself from the initial story. It questions the desire for a more feminine point of view, in a society that has become sanitized. When her producer, Édouard Weil, first spoke to her about another adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s book, the director had not seen the entire film. I was just intrigued by the power of Emmanuelle’s erotic image in the collective unconscious, while wondering if we could make it a cinematic language today. » A major challenge for Audrey Diwan, who spins out her feminist message without allowing herself to be confined either to an overly binary discourse that would exclude men or to cumbersome references to the original film. The proof? The wicker armchair has disappeared from the new version.