Sylvia Kristel is a plausible candidate for lead in a lush soft-core porn flick. She has candid blue eyes and her even features come together successfully without being staggeringly beautiful. Her figure, reassuringly feminine, is rangy and graceless. She seems to be hunched over most of the time. Her breasts are modest and her limbs are rather shapeless. The thing is, though, that she slings this chassis slowly around with such careless ease that she seems to be sexier than she is. She doesn't just walk. She minces along. And if she sits down and props her crossed heels on a table she allows her robe to fall open, not because she's been directed to do it but because she doesn't care if anyone glimpses any forbidden areas. The dubbed voice doesn't do her justice. It's babyish and breathless where it should be throaty and mellow.

Alain Cluny had me pretty much convinced as the secretly desperate intellectual in Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," but I swear he doesn't do it for me here. I can't understand why any woman would place herself in his hands in order to be opened up to experience. The guy's head has all the salient features of a perfect cube. If any women find his face appealing, then I can be certain I'm not a woman trapped in a man's body because I thought he was ugly as hell.

The plot is a hackneyed male fantasy. Ordinary, bourgeois housewife is encouraged to find sexual adventures outside the marital boudoir. Initiated into certain rituals that expand her mind. You can find the same theme in works of some circumstance, like Bunuel's "Belle de Jour" and in unembarrassed crap like "Deep Throat." The movie was shot in Thailand and on the Seychelles. We get a tourist's eye view of the people and scenery. All the white folks are terrifically rich and live like Roman emperors. The darkies are happily subservient and will do anything they're asked to do. The girls are all cute too. One performs a trick with a cigarette on stage that I saw done in the Richmond Theater in San Francisco. Everything seems clean, even the opium dens, and picturesque and inviting. Alfred Hitchcock could have shot this movie if he'd been a dirty old man.

Not that this is straight pornography. No, it soft porn, so there are lots of candles and arty compositions and tinkling wind chimes. The sex scenes are neither pompous nor believable. They're just there because this is a soft-core porn movie. Of course it was ground breaking in 1974. Everyone flocked to see it and it made a bundle, leading to a dozen or more sequels. I think there's an "Emmanuelle Meets the Seven Dwarfs" in pre-production.

At the same time we have to note that this is a FRENCH soft-core porn movie, so it's not all in-your-face and breasts like basketballs, the way an American soft-core movie would be. Instead we have interesting "philosophical" tripe.

"Chastity is a lack of generosity." "Love, to be real, has got to be unnatural." "I'm a real woman now. I spit on the others." "Love between couples should be outlawed." If you can get through that kind of pretentious dialog you're rewarded by seeing Sylvia Krystel taken in half a dozen different ways, including from behind by a sweaty Thai fighter still wearing his boxing gloves. (She was the prize.) Actually there's more female nudity than in today's feature films. The moral pendulum seems to be cycling back towards puritanism.

"Emmmanuelle" tells the story of a young French diplomats wife in Thailand, getting introduced into alternative sexual lifestyles and thereby questioning the classic model of relationship and marriage she once had known.

You can't say that there is no story at all. Of course you can see kind of a development from the beginning of the movie towards the end. Nevertheless most of the characters just remain too flat to impress and all in all the plot can be summarized in two or three sentences.

I don't know in how far the idea of open relationships and marriages can be called revolutionary in that time, but I do think that the aura of the forbidden helped making this movie big. As for the message, everyone has his own idea of sexuality and erotic and for some, as we know, open models serve well. Still, rape and lacking consent are surely not a part of them and just show that some of the characters here are rather depicted as sociopaths than as people with differing sexual preferences.

I guess you might call EMMANUELLE one of the most influential films of all time, based purely on the amount of sequels and rip-offs that followed. Seen today, it's a rather slight and dated French erotic movie with lots of softcore sex scenes. Definitely a case of stylish over substance, although not without merit for fans of the genre.

The amusingly-monikered Just Jaeckin is a dab hand at creating carefully set up establishing shots and making the most of some location shooting in Bangkok. Unusually for the genre, lead actress Sylvia Kristel seems to have been chosen for her acting performance rather than her looks, because she's quite convincing as the woman undergoing an odyssey of self-discovery.

I didn't think that the sex scenes were particularly erotic, but nonetheless there's fun to be had from the globetrotting antics and the other plot elements, including an unexpected round of Thai boxing! Even some tension and creepy moments towards the climax. The likes of EMMANUELLE will never be favourites of mine because this isn't my one of my preferred genres of film, but as visually artistic films go you could do a lot worse.