Partway through “Emmanuelle,” the French filmmaker Audrey Diwan’s third feature, a sleazy producer strikes up a conversation with the title character in a hotel spa. “Only two types of guests frequent luxury hotels,” he purrs to Emmanuelle, “those on the prowl and those on the run.”
The fact that Emmanuelle (a simmering Noémie Merlant) is of the former type is one of the foundational principles of this sporadically sexy, frequently aloof, and occasionally ridiculous movie, which marks something of a departure for Diwan. Like her excellent character study “Happening” — about a woman seeking an abortion in midcentury France — “Emmanuelle” is again a literary adaptation, although that’s about where the similarities end. The new film is based on Emmanuelle Arsan’s 1967 novel, which in 1974 spawned a very different adaptation: a soft-core porn phenomenon of the same name.
In readapting the book, Diwan — who was approached to make the movie by producers and wrote the screenplay alongside “Other People’s Children” filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski — tries to reframe the story with a woman’s touch, specifically by divorcing the pursuit of personal pleasure from the men (and women) whose beds Emmanuelle often shares.
The film opens by throwing viewers straight in. On a jet in first class, Emmanuelle, wearing a slinky dress and heels, makes eyes at the businessman sitting across from her. Soon, she’s sauntering off to the bathroom stall, where she meets the stranger for a quick session of thrusts and grunts. This pattern repeats itself once Emmanuelle arrives at her destination: a chic Hong Kong hotel called the Rosefield. Seated beside a couple at the bar one night, she effortlessly flirts her way into a ménage à trois.
In both of these cases, Emmanuelle ostensibly scores. There’s just one problem: Once she has her objects of desire in her clutches, her gaze turns from inviting to vacant. Emmanuelle has no trouble getting it up for the baiting part of the encounter. She just can’t feel anything during the sex acts — and so ends up going through the motions with a blank face and dead eyes. How can our seductress get herself to lean in and enjoy it?
Such is the question driving “Emmanuelle,” which follows its sultry working woman as she struggles to reconcile her considerable desire with that elusive holy grail: female gratification. The film tries to take the business of pleasure seriously — so seriously, in fact, that it spins a career out of it. Emmanuelle, we soon learn, is staying at the Rosefield as a “shark”: a quality control inspector deployed by the larger hospitality group to assess the hotel’s amenities. Staying in a penthouse suite, Emmanuelle rates the Rosefield experience while keeping an eye on the icy Rosefield manager, Margot (Naomi Watts), whom Emmanuelle’s bosses suspect of incompetence.
That this subplot concerning Margot proves largely peripheral to “Emmanuelle” should come as no big surprise. Diwan has set out to make erotica, after all, and amid this movie’s spate of stagy, ultra-sleek sex scenes, there’s limited stamina for anything beyond build-up and more build-up, since our girl can’t reach release. Offering her a shot at it, though, is Kei (Will Sharpe, sounding like he’s straining to deepen his voice by several octaves). A stony-faced American engineer, Kei is a frequent Rosefield guest whose mystery obsesses Emmanuelle. “You’re chasing after a ghost,” the hotel security shrugs, when Emmanuelle requests insight into Kei’s erratic routine.
Over time, Kei’s spectral presence comes to serve as a metaphor for Emmanuelle’s elusive sexual gratification — like her own pleasure, this insomniac traveler is difficult to pin down. Diwan also externalizes Emmanuelle’s striving for pleasure in her environment: the pristine but severe Rosefield, a venue as forbidding as it is lavish. At one point, Margot even reveals to Emmanuelle that there’s a secret wing of the hotel still under construction; Margot succeeds in keeping it hidden from guests by hiring a construction crew who works silently.
Silent, noisy, arid, fresh — all of these qualities can also apply to bodies, and they do over the course of this erotic journey, which spends as much time lingering on Emmanuelle’s razor running up and down her leg as it does on her character’s thoughts and motivations. That’s probably for the best, as the movie’s dialogue largely consists of clunkers. (Maybe “you seem to be a stickler for rules, but you don’t always follow them, do you?” sounded better in the screenwriters’ native French.) When, over a hotel coffee, Emmanuelle taps her finger on the counter to reproduce for Kei the tempo at which a man thrusted inside her, the moment feels straight out of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “50 Shades of Grey” — except that the pair are both guarded Christian Greys with no wide-eyed Anastasia Steele to balance out the mood.
Diwan is of course going for Wong Kar-wai over Taylor-Johnson, “Lost in Translation” over “Showgirls.” But in aiming for a piece of atmospheric sensuality, she instead lands in an erotic no man’s land, where the dramatic but obvious filmmaking — like an orbital shot when Emmanuelle finally reaches orgasm — isn’t surprising or evocative enough to make up for the silly monologues and empty characterizations.
It’s jarring to see a gifted filmmaker like Diwan commit her running time to all austere settings and no substance. Beholding the anticlimax, you might find yourself seeking out sparks of interest, like the exotic bouquet in the Rosefield lobby that droops as the day passes. Talk about a petite mort. Or how about the film’s through-line of surveillance, reflected in the hotel’s CCTV observation room and Emmanuelle’s selfie phone camera? Indeed, the movie’s sexiest scene finds our temptress entering Kei’s room and wordlessly taking nude photos of herself on his bed. As Emmanuelle watches herself through her lens, an autoerotic pulse throbs through the movie like a heartbeat. It may be a faint one, but at least it’s proof of life.
