Colibel
Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.
Ketrivie
It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
Hayleigh Joseph
This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.
SnoopyStyle
Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) travels from Paris to Bangkok to be with her French diplomat husband Jean. The older Jean is her sex mentor and wants her to have other men. There are several diplomat wives including Ariane and the younger Marie-Ange. Both get closer sexually to Emmanuelle with Jean's approval. Marie-Ange introduces her to Mario but she falls for female archaeologist B.This is one third sexploitation porn, one third Euro art-house wannabe, and one third exotic travelogue. It's notable for its existence at a point in time. The sex is often softcore but there is some hardcore smoking going on here also. While Kristel is compelling, her character is problematic with a meandering sexcapade story. She is often portrayed as a student of sex but she can only do a faux-innocent. It's the writing more than the acting. In one moment, she's being pushed to learn while in other moments, she's jumping into sexual situations. It comes off as bad faking.
michellelocke007
caught this movie on my late night cable network and settled in to watch one of the great erotic masterpieces of the early seventies by erotic auteur just juecken of Gwendoline and the histoire of o fame. i did enjoy the lovely and lush scenery, theme song and exotic locales but found the pace rather slow moving for my taste. i though that Sylvia Kristel who plays the iconic role was just perfect and certainly didn't shy away from the nudity. the only part of the movie that intrigued and piqued my interest was when Kristel character met up with and began an affair with Marika green's character. immediately Kristel is fascinated by green and invites herself to tag along for the trip. you see the the two as they travel along and work side by side doing their daily chores. the way that Kristel absolutely adores and fawns over green. its' a shame that the writers didn't continue this storyline as it would have been interesting to see how it would have all played out. this one role catapulted a than un-known Kristel into super-stardom and se would go on to star in several sequels in the emmanuelle series much of it forgettable. she could not launch her career in America and what roles she did receive were usually stereotyped sexpot ones such as private lessons, Mata hair and lady chatterly's lover. it must have proved frustrating for Kristel who clearly wanted to move on from her one role. a decent flick if you're looking for something to watch on a Friday evening with a lot of skin.
georg-62
I first saw this film back in 1976, and only remembered that it was fiercely arousing to a young man at the time. I didn't catch the story, however. Times have changed since then, and I recently viewed the film a couple of times, when I wrote subtitles to it so I could show it to a close friend.Emmanuelle falls between X-rated and art-house. If one views it as an adult film, then the lack of male frontal nudity and full-on intercourse make the film feel timid. OTOH, for an art film, the plot is quite thin.When the film premiered in the mid '70s, it made a stir. Most of the brouhaha was about it being shown in regular theaters instead of seedy back-alley ones. Today we see so much erotics and sex in regular films and on TV that such discussions would seem ridiculous.Emmanuelle is based on the autobiographical novel with the same name, by Emmanuelle Arsan. The book (1971) was banned in France, ostensibly for too much erotic content, but the Foreign Department may have influenced this, since the story gives a decadent impression of them.Young and innocent Emmanuelle travels to Bangkok to her newly-wed husband, ten years her senior. He lives in a setting where bored Embassy wives resort to promiscuity and intrigue to fend off a sense of boredom and lack of purpose in life. Her husband clearly feels at home in this setting.Both her husband and the wives tell Emmanuelle to "get free of inhibitions", which they themselves clearly have done. The film is essentially her journey towards that goal. Her husband has others help him in "her education".At first viewing the film is admittedly just an erotic flick, with thin connections between the erotic scenes. But after a few more times it becomes clear that director Jaeckin and screen writer Richard really tried to follow the book, and the characters and their actions seemed plausible and natural.Perhaps the most surprising thing about this film is, it does not seem old, like many other European erotic films of the time.One can also view this film as a discourse between the male and female aspects of sensuality. There is the male dream of sex and eroticism without emotional commitment, and promiscuous relations with beautiful, willing girls and women. And the (possibly today somewhat outdated?) female sexuality as sensuality, commitment and pure love, with its slow love making and longing for true companionship.Emmanuelle can also be seen as a spiritual road movie, where she starts off as an innocent, yet strongly sensual girl, who slowly reaches sexual awareness and competence. From sex drive as the master to her as the master and erotics as just another tool in her chest.I would strongly recommend this film especially for grown-ups who have seen enough porn, or love scenes in regular films, and who want to remember instead what erotic meant. There still aren't that many films in this niche between porn and mainstream.
Karl Self
There is a whole raft of French 1970ies porn movies, and while a surprising number of them take place in beautiful French châteaus -- and their less picturesque cellars -- and are set to la-la-music that would bore the pants off Enya, quite a few of them are rather good, actually -- and really filthy.Here we have the movie that started it all, and yet I was disappointed. Granted, it's beautifully photographed, and the sex scenes pack a lot of sizzle, but the rest was lame and shallow. Emmanuelle is a young woman who -- you guessed correctly -- wants to explore her sexuality. What I had to accomplish singled-handedly in the grubby furtivity of our garden shed with the bra pages from the Sears catalogue, she can have a go at with the cream of beautiful French actresses and all the Oriental totty they couldn't beat off with a soiled stick in beautiful Thailand. And in a squash court. You'd think the permutations were endless, but what it boils down to is a long alternation of heady talk (maybe my French isn't good enough, but I thought it was all gibberish) followed up by breathy sex scenes (which are strictly softcore, by the way). Maybe I'm the exception from the rule here, but I don't only watch a movie such as this for the sex scenes, I actually do care about the rest of the movie.The story disintegrates further when Emmanuelle, after two encounters with random men and a romance with a younger girl and an older woman, inexplicably shacks up with a grubby old man, and reaches its absolute low point when he subjects her to gang rape -- which is all the more revolting because it is filmed in wonky ouh-ah soft focus.
