“Emmanuelle”, stop giggling in the cottages

Barely the film “Emmanuelle”, 2024 version revisited by director Audrey Diwanon the screens, that it’s already the cure. How can the French director move from a worthy cause – the conquest of the right to abortion in her previous film “The Event”, Golden Lion in Venice in 2021 – to a remake of this summit of inherited kitsch from the 70s? People are laughing, people are already laughing at the idea that we now have to display a feminist label to dare to show a piece of nipple on the big screen. We quietly compare Noémie Merlant’s kidney failure and the late Sylvia Kristel. We’re looking for the chair. We’re happy to take a look with a clear conscience – think, a woman filming a woman, phew, nothing to be ashamed of.

I would like to put an end to this priest and these imbecile sneers. There is nothing more important – and interesting! – today as a subject that the conquest of feminine desire. Reconquest, rather.

We are seven years after the start of the social movement known as #MeToo. Whether we like it or not, beyond a vast denunciation of sexual attackers, he called into question all sexual and romantic behavior of men and women. To put it quickly, #MeToo has ruined everything. If men have been and still are its collateral victims, women are dancing, squarely and paradoxically, on a pile of ruins. If no one is now unaware of the definition of the word “consent”, there is a word that we have lost sight of, and that is “desire”. Getting rid of the “male gaze”, or desire when it is unwelcome, is one thing. Not throwing desire out with the bathwater is another matter. #MeToo, unintentionally, because it was simpler, confiscated the pleasure. Or, at the very least, leaves women with unanswered questions. To experience desire – for a man, for a woman – is not already submitting to this man, to this woman? Can we get rid of men but keep desire? Is desire even feminist? Are we more free asexual than desiring? We have conquered the “no”. But by saying “no”, by protecting ourselves, by no longer letting ourselves be dominated, mastered, controlled, we have also closed the door to desire, which by definition cannot be controlled and takes over our senses without asking for control. permission.

A closed cage

It’s boring. And this is why “Emmanuelle” is an important film. It is a step in the process of rebuilding women. “Emmanuelle” is not a remake. It is the story of the sexuality of the woman of today, in 2024, who by dint of locking her body, has become a closed cage to which she has lost the key. It’s a sad story – how can you be happy living next to your body? – which can end well, as long as we stop laughing in the cottages, precisely. It’s not just a story of good women. It is the story of the new liberation of women. I reassure you: rinsing the eye is part of the alchemy of desire.

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