Goodbye Emmanuelle

The Goodbye Gal

Goodbye Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle 3
Directed by François Leterrier
France 1976
Severin Films Blu Ray

Warning: Some end of movie spoilers here.

Goodbye Emmanuelle is a bit of an outlier in terms of the original Emmanuelle trilogy (if you choose to group them like that… and many people do). Perhaps the giveaway is in the opening credits where it states it’s based on the character Emmanuelle rather than actually taking any of Emmanuelle Arsan’s books as a source inspiration. That would certainly explain a couple of things.

Two big things which make this stick out like a sore thumb, plus one aside about the trilogy of films’ ‘supposed’ status of softcore pornography (they’re not but then I’m loathe to pigeonhole anything under the ridiculous  label ‘art film’ either). 

One is... it’s structured like a more mainstream movie, which I’ll expand on in just a second and the other is that, despite not being based on one of Arsan’s novels, it actually, for the first third of the film, upholds the original writer and her husband’s ideologies of an open marriage with no jealousy. More so, I think, than the first two movies did. However, the rest of the movie does go on to completely betray that open spirit, it seems to me and, I suspect Arsan herself would not have been happy with the direction this movie takes.

Once again, Emmanuelle is played both sensitively and intelligently as a somewhat more naive character, it seemed to me, by the great Sylvia Kristel. And Umberto Orsini returns from the previous film as her husband Jean.

Okay, so the film actually has a storyline of sorts, dealing with Emmanuelle’s pursuit of a film director, played by Jean-Pierre Bouvierre (Kristel’s soon to be real life romantic partner Ian McShane failed the audition for this part because he couldn’t speak fluent French, it would seem), who is scouting locations in her neighbourhood. When they get it on, leading to a temporary rejection of her by this new guy, Jean becomes uncharacteristically jealous and it all ultimately leads to he and Emmanuelle splitting up at the end and her leaving the country, in pursuit of this new guy. Which, as I said, completely fails the tenets of both her characters’ and the original author’s (or authors’, depending on what you believe) philosophies on love and eroticism.

Now, the thing about the structure of the movie is that, while it has a few erotic episodes… with even less sex than the previous instalments… it’s not as episodic in feel to the previous two movies, nor indeed, the novels those movies purported to be adapting. So it’s not as loose and even the acting is more ensemble in nature than those previous two (almost as if someone had asked Robert Altman to direct an Emmanuelle movie).

There’s even a metaphor at one point, when an old man tells Emmanuelle and her latest lover a story about his wife getting eaten in front of him by a shark. It turns out not to be true and a story the guy tells because he can’t face the fact his wife ran off with another guy but, I think by this point in the film it’s more a comment of the rocky marriage of Emmanuelle and Jean in a metaphorical way, more than anything else.

The sex scenes are much more expressionistic impressions than even the previous two (which were similar but not quite as brief as these ones) but they do at least punctuate the film at regular intervals as though one of the producers, who was about to become mayor (or much higher I believe) wanted to maintain the impression that it’s still an erotic movie of sorts, without wanting to offend his voters.

Another thing is that the ensemble scenes and the noisy ‘gathering’ scenes (where Kristel performs a cute but overly long dance) have the effect of imbuing the long, quieter sequences with the impression of it being a much more reflective film than it, perhaps, actually is.

Also... different times. When Emmanuelle beds her maid at the start of the film (with her husband arriving home and joining in half way through), she has to make up a ridiculous story for her to tell the woman’s waiting husband because of his jealousy. Later on, the same housemaid has a big black eye because her husband caught her sitting on another man’s lap. But nothing in the dialogue or acting seems to express that he was wrong to hit his wife and… yeah.. like I said, different times.

The saving grace of the film (and that’s not Serge Gainsbourg’s score and his dodgy title song) is the absolutely beautiful cinematography, which matches the previous movie for sheer beauty… and of course, a fair few shots of the beautiful body of the lead actress… she seems to be very photogenic, for sure. But that’s about it for me and the movie Goodbye Emmanuelle. The film ends with a long held note of melancholy and its sad to see Sylvia’s ‘almost swan song’ - she would return briefly for the fourth to have her appearance somehow magically altered at the start by plastic surgery into a much younger actress* - in the role see her go out on such a sad note, almost of betrayal (I’m siding with Jean in this one) but there it is. It’s still an enjoyable watch though and in some ways does still feel like it belongs with the previous two, to an extent.

* I’m not quite ready to open the can of worms of Sylvia returning to the TV movies of Emmanuelle decades later... but I have looked up their availability, for sure.