Emmanuelle

(France)

Trinacra/Orphee. Director Just Jaeckin; Screenplay Jean-Louis Richard; Camera Richard Suzuki; Editor Claudine Bouche; Music Pierre Bachelet, Herve Roy; Art Director Baptiste Poirot

Sylvia Kristel
Alain Cuny
Daniel Sarky
Jeanne Colletin
Marika Green
Christine Boisson

Based on a bestselling book [by 'Emmanuelle Arsan'] about the sexual liberation of a young woman, and with some production dress and the exotic locale of Bangkok, this is still softcore. Film is a series of glossy images and appears more a come-on for the civil service than for femme lib.

Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) is a thin, sexy girl who goes to join her husband in Bangkok where he is attached to the French Embassy. Though looking innocent, but enamored of love making, she had managed to be seduced by two men on the plane.

In Bangkok she meets a sultry teenager given to masturbation who intros her to an older man (Alain Cuny) who is to finally reveal the secrets of her true sexual and femme liberation. At the same time, Emmanuelle falls for a lesbian anthropologist, masturbates with the young girl, and is raped in an opium den.

Direction is a bit pompous, but lensing is good. Acting is a bit self-conscious, except for Cuny as the older man who initiates Emmanuelle into the rites of love. Kristel is acceptably ingenuous as the part-innocent, part-sex-obsessed heroine.

(Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1974. Running time: 105 MIN.

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