“Anything goes,” says a diplomat in Just Jaeckin’s 1974 soft-sex classic “Emmanuelle,” about the prospects of having sex above the clouds on an intercontinental flight from France to Thailand. “But nothing is possible,” replies his business partner, who doubts that there would be willing passengers on board. Emmanuelle, played by Sylvia Kristel, makes the impossible possible: in the film's most iconic scene, which is still quoted as often as it is parodied, she sleeps with two men: one on a row of seats in the middle of the gaze of curious passengers in first class the other in the more discreet seclusion of the on-board toilet. With this episode, Audrey Diwan also opens her “Emmanuelle“-Reboot, made in 2024 to mark the 50th anniversary of the cult film. But the “The Event” director accentuates and tells it completely differently:
While in the original Emmanuelle briefly tells a friend about this experience and the film then illustrates what is described in such detail and in a velvety, over-aesthetic way, in the new edition we see how Emmanuelle, played by the fantastic Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames”), lures a man into the plane's toilet before the camera slowly moves towards her facial features, which appear more focused than lustful, and finally fades out.
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At first there doesn't seem to be much left of this acquaintance, only a dark, shimmering blood clot on Emmanuelle's pelvis, the place where the man pushed her against the sink during sex. And yet the film returns to that later: In a hotel lobby, Emmanuelle tells a mysterious stranger, Kei (Will Sharpe), everything in detail, tapping loudly with her fingernails on a table top – that is the rhythm with which he penetrates me , she says, now much more excited. Only in the retelling does she control this moment retroactively.

Emmanuelle (Noémie Merlant) is responsible for the guests' satisfaction – and takes this responsibility to heart…
The way in which both films show and tell the same thing in completely different ways is the clearest way to see how radically different and yet in direct dialogue Diwan behaves in her masterful remake to the original film: this was once in the form of a glossy mainstream film. Production expresses the more perceived than real freedom of the 1970s, “Emmanuelle” in 2024 is, on the one hand, characterized by a darker and almost disillusioned melancholy in the face of dwindling opportunities, but on the other hand also finds other ways in which desires and cravings can be satisfied.
Unlike in the original, Emmanuelle is no longer the unemployed wife of a diplomat who learns to articulate her needs in the international sex jet set, but is instead responsible for quality assurance in hotels worldwide. She evaluates customer satisfaction, so she performs one of the most important service jobs in the 21st century. Diwan never leaves any doubt for a second that the Hong Kong hotel microcosm in which the film almost exclusively takes place is a condensed symbol of the late capitalism of our present day. At the same time, it is also one whose shimmering, reflective surfaces radiate their own kind of seductive eroticism. The camera is only too willing to follow Noémie Merlant through the winding corridors of the hotel in seemingly endless journeys, bathing in the intense blue and yellow tones of the light penetrating the rooms through the building's glazed window fronts.

In the late capitalist glossy world of the “Emmanuelle” reboot, it is no longer as easy to satisfy sexual desires as it was in the soft sex classic from 1974.
Having control over the cycle of this company, learning to understand what gives guests satisfaction, is a new, beautiful form of sexual pleasure in “Emmanuelle”. The film only leaves this sophisticated world once: Following a hidden, coded invitation, Emmanuelle goes to the Chungking Mansions, a mysteriously confusing building complex full of shops and shady bars, which is now the epitome of a disappearing, excitingly dirtier Hong Kong and the Wong Kar -Wai once set a monument with “Chungking Express”. With this cinephilically charged homage to a place of the past, Diwan also points to something else: the promises and temptations contained therein are already outside of their world for today's viewers and say goodbye unnoticed.
“Emmanuelle” was almost unanimously rejected as a competition entry at the San Sebastián Film Festival and was met with shrugging indifference when it was released in French-speaking countries. This stubborn masterpiece does not fulfill the expectations of a hoped-for revival of erotic material produced for the cinema and also rejects the usual templates and requirements of today (the new Emmanuelle may be many things, but certainly not a girl boss). The supposed bulkiness, its mixture of intellectual coolness and complicated sexiness, also refers to other misunderstood and hitherto insufficiently loved films: those by Isabelle Stever (“Grand Jeté”), for example, or the late work by David Cronenberg (“Crimes Of The Future”). Like these films, “Emmanuelle” may grasp the present so perceptively that only future generations will be able to take this perspective.
Conclusion: “Emmanuelle” by Audrey Diwan is a radical reinterpretation of the soft sex classic from the 1970s. Set amidst the enticingly shimmering surfaces of a hotel complex in Hong Kong, the underrated masterpiece tells of how complex desires can perhaps still be satisfied in late capitalism.