Emanuela: Which great actress did Noemi Merlant replace?

what are you talking about Emanuel is looking for a lost pleasure. He is flying alone to Hong Kong for a business trip. In this sensual city-world, she multiplies her experiences and meets Kay, a man who continues to elude her.

Lea Seydoux was waiting!

Originally, Léa Seydoux was slated to play the lead role of Emmanuelle, but Audrey Divan ultimately preferred Noemi Merlant, as she explained in her February 2023 Deadline column: “I love Léa Seydoux. I want to do a movie with her in the future. But she didn’t really fit my imagination.”

A new adaptation

Emanuel is based on the novel of the same name by Emanuel Arsani, published in 1959 and which benefited from the successful film adaptation of Just Jackin in 1974 with Sylvia Christel in the title role. However, Audrey Divan wanted to move away from the erotic film in order to focus more on the book and make a feminist adaptation.

Change the scenery

While the book is set in Bangkok—Emmanuel Arsani is from Thailand—Audrey Divan has moved her location to Hong Kong, explaining: “I was looking for a place that expresses cosmopolitanism while in Asia, an opportunity to unabashedly question the remnants of colonialism in our current system. This place is both exotically inspired while being completely over the top, emptied of all substance and over the top. Everything is based on extremely violent class relations”he said.

He continues: “I wanted to take the opposite view of the book on this issue, to point out the colonial and classicist violence of such places, with the idea that many have to sweat in order to benefit some.

Prestigious inspirations

The feature film is inspired by the filmography of the actresses who play it, such as Mulholland Drive (Naomi Watts), the portrait aesthetics of the fire girl (Noemi Merlant) or the series White Lotus for Will Sharp. However, Rebecca Zlotowski, who signed the script, and Audrey Diwan also voiced Claire Dolan by Lodge Kerrigan, Jeanne Diehlman by Chantal Ackerman or Cléo de 5 à 7 by Agnes Varda.

Emmanuel 2.0

If the book takes place in the 1950s and the film takes place in the 1970s, the director wanted to make Emmanuelle a present-day heroine, with topical issues of societal taboos about female pleasure: “Other more intimate questions arose, particularly about my journey as a woman and my relationship with sexuality, pleasure, my desire to be free from the norms that govern seduction and sex.”

“In our time, it seems to me that pleasure is completely connected to the imperative of performance, in the capitalist sense of the term, we must make it profitable, optimize, enjoy.. Reading the film, according to Audrey Diwan, is the way in which Emmanuel avoids references to sexual performance to the detriment of pleasure.