Emmanuelle by Audrey Diwan: After the pain, the pleasure
After diving into pain with The event (Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021), returns with Audrey Diwan Emmanuellea film that shifts the mind towards pleasure, but in a subtle and complex way. It is not a simple exploration of sexuality or a remake of the famous 1974 film, but a new approach inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel. Here pleasure becomes an ambiguous terrain, almost an absence, a search that seems to slip away at every moment.
Noémie Merlant plays a modern Emmanuelle, a seasoned professional who, paradoxically, has become disconnected from her own desires. She works in the buildings, ensuring that every detail is designed to deliver results. an optimal pleasure experience for customerswhile she herself seems devoid of any capacity to feel what she should value. In this luxurious world, pleasure has become a product to be consumed, a standard to be achieved, and not a personal emotion.
The film begins with a scene in which Emmanuelle, during a business class flight to Hong Kong, has mechanical sex with a stranger. There is no passion or desire, only senseless actions, reduced to a simple performance. This coldness perfectly sums up Emmanuelle’s life: a body in motion, cut off from any real pleasure. In complete opposition to the 1974 film.
Audrey Diwan chooses not to make it a simple carnal journey, but an immersion in the inner life of her character. The film is less a search for sexual adventures just a thought on what desire isand what it becomes when it is suffocated by social pressure, perfection and meeting other people’s expectations.
Through Emmanuelle, the director questions our contemporary relationship with the body and pleasure. How to find your desire in a society that imposes performance and where everything seems calibrated to please others, but rarely themselves.
Another approach to erotic film
The director’s work captures this inner wandering. He films the silences, the automatic gestures, the deep disconnection of Emmanuelle from her body. As in his previous films, the director makes the body a place of questioning. Here, Emmanuelle’s body becomes a ground for reconciliation with herself, but this reconciliation is far from obvious or rapid.
Emmanuelle It is not an easy film, nor is it designed to please the greatest number of people. Audrey Diwan offers a reflection on intimacy and desire that escapes clichés and simplistic solutions. It asks questions without always offering answersand it is precisely this ambiguity that is the film’s strength. Refusing to give in to traditional expectations of what an erotic film should be, the director constructs a work that pushes us to question our relationship with our body(s).
With this film, Audrey Diwan once again establishes herself as a bold director, capable of arousing emotions and taking a fresh look at complex themes. Far from the classic provocation patternsprefers to probe the gray areas of desire and self-loss.
It is not a film that shouts, but that whispers. Where other films about the pursuit of pleasure or sexuality can afford to do so conspicuous or provocative demonstrationsAudrey Diwan opts for subtlety and sobriety.
Every gesture, every look, every silence has more weight than the words themselves. The film does not want to offend, but to invite the viewer to listen to what happens beneath the surface, such as the environment in which most of the film takes place.
Source: Cine Serie
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