I, Emmanuelle

Erotic Breakdown

I, Emmanuelle
aka Io, Emmanuelle
aka A Man For Emmanuelle
aka Emmanuelle
Directed by Cesare Canevari
Italy 1968
Rofima Cinematografica
Severin Films Blu Ray
as part of their Saga Erotica Emmanuelle Collection

Warning: All the spoilers for this wonderful film. 

Wow. Just wow. 

Sometimes a Blu Ray label... and it seems @severinfilms are particularly adept at this... will put out a film that absolutely knocks your socks off, blows your mind and reminds you why you started partaking of ‘the cinematic arts’ in the first place. Which is what I, Emmanuelle did to me when I watched it but, to be honest, I was debating whether to make this review part of my Emmanuelle Arsan At NUTS4R2 strand of movies at all. And the simple reason for that is... it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Emmanuelle Arsan. 

However, I can see why Severin decided to include it as part of their Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection Blu Ray boxed set and so, since it’s such a good movie and it does have a very remote connection, I thought I’d include it here where it can get more exposure. And here’s why...

This film predates Emmanuelle (reviewed here) by five years and it wasn’t trying to bandwagon onto that movie... however, it was trying to band wagon onto the notoriety of Arsan’s original novel. Now, we’re all used to seeing Italians produce waves of knock offs around particular genres and also titles. I mean, how many spaghetti westerns which have absolutely nothing to do with Django include the name Django in their title? Hundreds, right? Well, here we have the Italians Django-ing Emmanuelle’s name onto the title of the film and calling their main character after her. But, in fact, it’s based on a short story called Disintegration ‘68, written by Graziella Di Prospero. And, I almost pity the man (or woman) in the street when this came out thinking they were walking into a sexy, erotic Emmanuelle movie because, although the film does deal with sex... it’s certainly not all that sexy and is a real downer of a movie, quite deliberately so, it seems to me. 

So the film starts with such a texturally swirling camera movement going in 360 degree circles that I initially thought there was something wrong with my Blu Ray copy, Then we get glimpses of the main star, Erika Blank, as she’s swirling around in a spinning chair. And this trope of a camera doing those loops is echoed throughout the film, sometimes with the camera itself or sometimes with a character who’s looping around on their own. It even points out the cyclic nature of the film itself and that opening camera shot is something we’ll come back to in the end with the ‘ritual of milk’ scene... we’ll get there. 

And this turns out ot be a movie about a severely depressed woman on the verge of losing herself to either a nervous breakdown or suicide. Indeed, Emmanuelle sometimes jump cuts in her head to a vision of herself landed on the street below, after she has thrown herself out of her flat, in little moments that crash into the visuals and collective audience consciousness in exactly the same way that a movie by Nicolas Roeg would do it. Completely disorienting the viewer as much as it does Emmanuelle and it’s just one small part of a sensual attack which builds up into a cacophony of visual and audio invasions on the audience. Again, as much as it does to the central character. So things like advertising slogans blaring in her head simultaneously pitched with newsreel atrocities from the Vietnam war and a ‘strung up like a puppet’ Action Man which she keeps seeing, manifesting itself in real life, as the sound of pigs eating matches the visuals of diners in a high class restaurant stuffing their faces and they suddenly turn into real life flesh versions of said Action Man. It’s amazing stuff.

So the story, such as it is, sounds like it could be a movie taking on the tenets of Emmanuelle Arsan... but it really isn’t. 

Emmanuelle can’t find her boyfriend, who has left his house without telling her he was going to be away. So this film follows her wandering the streets and spaces of Italy for the day, completely depressed and trying to find a man to sex her up. She goes through a number of lovers but, each time they start to sexy her up as she requests, she turns frigid at their touch and this ultimately ends up with her being both hostile and destructive to each suitor. For example, burning a writer’s new novel manuscript while he’s in the bath after failing to satisfy her... or stealing a charm given to a lover by his mother, in terms of the film’s most famous actor (besides the well loved Erika Blanc), Adolfo Celi (yup, Largo from Thunderball, reviewed here, is in this and, he keeps turning up in films I’ve been watching lately), playing against type somewhat as a pretty decent person, suckered into playing Emmanuelle’s game.

And as the film progresses through various encounters with people like this... including a self harming escort who burns himself with cigarettes... we watch Emmanuelle’s slow but constant and intense breakdown manifesting itself... with absolutely beautiful and often experimental cinematography. 

For instance, the director might start a shot with everything just a blur for five to ten seconds. And the sound design matches the chaotic nature of the movie, where he uses that tried and trusted cliché of switching from an intense build up of sound to total silence in the next shot, used as a transition. And the shot compositions! My gosh...

For instance, after five or so minutes of the film has gone by and Erika’s Emmanuelle takes to the streets, we see a street with two lamp posts on either side of it as we look down at her, cutting it into thirds and with her firmly placed in the middle third. Or, when she is talking to a woman in a restaurant and the woman has her head and shoulders to us, with her fingers and thumb rested against the side of her head, the rest of the shot is a blur except for... Emmanuelle’s right eye seen on left of screen, showing through the little ‘o’ of a gap created by the other woman’s hand against her head. It’s astonishing stuff, I tell you. 

If I were to try and give you a sense of what this film is like from referencing other works... well first I would say that it’s a film very much of its time, you just couldn’t make something like this today and get away with it... and that it reminded me of the kinds of surreal, contemporary prose that writers like J. G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch used to submit to New Worlds science fiction magazine back in the sixties when Michael Moorcock was calling the shots. Or, in cinematic terms, it’s like watching Jack Cardiff’s Girl With A Motorcycle but cross pollinated with an unhealthy dose of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

So, yeah, this movie is a portrait of a woman in breakdown and she’s quite startlingly played by Erika Blanc here. Okay, so she’s a big genre star of things like Italian horror and gialli but she’s never been a favourite of mine. Here though, she looks astonishingly beautiful, even when she’s constantly suffering from stomach cramps... and, I dunno, she should have got the Italian equivalent of an Oscar for this performance. She’s absolutely stunning and it’s completely riveting. 

The last scene of the film... and this sees us deep into spoiler territory folks... sees her back on her spinning chair in her flat, a while after learning the lover who left has burned to death in a car crash earlier in the day. She nearly shoots herself but instead shoots a photo of herself and then goes through a cleansing ritual on the chair, which somehow involves her pouring milk overspilling her mouth onto her naked body (much like Salvador Dali used to say he did each morning at breakfast, after getting dressed as a kid). I didn’t really understand it, to be honest but, it looks kinda pretty and, again, like all the nude scenes in the movie (of which there are too few), it looks really great. 

And on top of that... on top of all of that... the film has an absolutely stonking score by the great Gianni Ferrio, one of my favourite Italian composers to be fair. And it’s expectedly amazing, sounding a little like the composers score for Death Walks At Midnight crashed together with his score for Death Occurred Last Night. And as the ultimate cherry on top of all of this... the vocals on the main song are sung by no less an artist as... Mina. Yup, the great Mina lends her vocalisations to this movie and it really lingers in the ear canals I can tell you that. And, thankfully, the almighty Severin Films have seen fit to include a CD of the score bundled in with this set. So, yeah, this film and its CD are well worth the price of admission alone.

And that’s me done with Io, Emmanuelle, I think. An astonishing film which lives up to that old cliché of something cinematic being an assault on the senses. I am so going to revisit this movie every few years to remind myself just why I got into watching movies in the first place. I’m sure this movie must feel like what taking a drug must feel like. Just astonishing stuff.