Sylvia Kristel: Emmanuelle's Memories of Thailand
The smell of hot rain with broken hearted confusion. The endless river traffic and songs from a past that never ends. Dancers whose limbs seem to move in defiance of their skeletons. And there she is, Emmanuelle, not the one in the book but the blue-eyed elfin-faced Sylvia Kristel. Strangely guileless despite all her exploits.
It was many years before I saw Emmanuelle. I was far too young when it was released. But the book was passed around classrooms endlessly, passages read a re-read. Short meaningless affairs on an aeroplane. The strange relationships she had with the bored wives of the various diplomats stationed in Bangkok. When I first saw it, I felt it was all too soft focus. It took me a few years to see it again and to realise that Kristel made it work in a way completely different from the novel.
People don't believe this today, but Emmanuelle was a movie that couples went to see. Other erotic films tended to be frequented by men alone. In pre-video days, but Emmanuelle had an appeal that extended beyond what normally satisfied men. Kristel wasn't just a pretty girl. She was an icon. She had vulnerability on screen but it wasn't dumb vulnerability. It was the vulnerability of someone coming to terms with a world that is off-kilter. In the book, the perverse Huysman-esque philosophy of Mario seems the point that the author was leading to. In the film, it is love that Emmanuelle seeks. And it is love that seems to be betrayed for her. She wanders above the world she inhabits. Her home has umpteen servants. She doesn't know what to make of the Thai people. But her intentions are always kind of pure.
There are scenes in the film that contradict the role as Kristel plays it but it's one of the great films of the seventies, of all time in fact, it has qualities that people love to dismiss. I won't say why I think this is.
Just Jaeckin and director of photography, Richard Suzuki make this one of the best looking of films. It places you firmly in a world which time has turned into an alien world.
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