‘Emmanuelle’ Review: Notionally Revisionist Remake of the Softcore Classic Is One Big Anti-Climax

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic On paper, a contemporary feminist spin on “Emmanuelle” sounds like a zesty idea. An ostensible portrait of liberated female sexuality firmly ossified in patriarchal politics, Just Jaeckin’s 1974 softcore smash is the kind of cultural touchstone so emblematic of its era that the very act of remaking it qualifies as a symbolic statement of sorts.

In practice, however, “Emmanuelle” is a text so flimsy that reworking it is a bit like trying to defibrillate a blancmange: There’s no pulse of an idea there to activate, much less subvert.

Saying something freshly substantive about female desire while honoring the film’s defining spirit of vapid, diaphanous horniness is a tricky, potentially unworkable brief; Audrey Diwan‘s inert, frequently frigid new film opts to do neither.

Opening this year’s San Sebastian festival on a tepid note, “Emmanuelle” can only be regarded as a disappointment from Diwan, the writer-director who landed a Golden Lion at Venice three years ago with her tender but tough-minded reproductive rights drama “Happening.” If this seems an unlikely follow-up to such a project, at least on a tonal level, one can nonetheless identify the theoretical tissue connecting two films about a woman’s agency over her own body.