The original Emmanuelle, a tale of a young woman’s erotic adventures in Bangkok, was a tawdry, trashy romp, a French-sploitation sexcapade that should have been filed away in a drawer marked: “It was different in the 70s, honestly.” Instead – inexplicably – it has been disinterred by director Audrey Diwan (quite the change of pace after her harrowing Venice prize-winning abortion drama Happening). Diwan relocates the action to Hong Kong and remakes Emmanuelle as a glossy but dispiriting treatise on the emptiness of the corporate world, punctuated by lots of panting, lip-chewing abandon.
Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) plays Emmanuelle, whose job seems to entail being bitchy in various luxury hotels. Her taste for the high life is only matched by her appetite for anonymous carnal activities. But what Emmanuelle craves most is the one thing she can’t have: enigmatic flood defences engineer (no, really) Kei Shinohara (Will Sharpe, wearing the pained expression of someone who has just found an errant toenail clipping in his Egyptian cotton hotel bed linen). Beyond ill-advised.
In UK and Irish cinemas
