Laure (aka Forever Emmanuelle)

Emm-Anne-Belle

Laure
aka Forever Emmanuelle
Directed by Emmanuelle Arsan/
Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane and
Roberto D’Ettorri Piazzoli 
Italy/France 1976
Severin DVD Region 0

Warning: Light spoilers.

Well, here we go again. Laure is the movie adaptation (possibly, I’ll address that because… I have a theory) of Emmanuelle Arsan’s book of the same name (reviewed by me here). And you can read my book review for the story content of what goes on as directed above… I’m wasting no time on the plot here.

But here’s the thing... as Severin’s DVD* sleeve promotes it, “The Uncensored Erotic Odyssey Co-Starting, Written and Directed by the Real-Life Emmanuelle”. And at least some of that is true. She has a large role as Myrte here so, if you were ever wondering what the real life Emmanuelle looked like… well… there’s a lot of her on show, so you won’t be disappointed.

Whether she actually directed this is debatable. Certainly both her husband and constant collaborator Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, were a presence on the film and at least one of the actors I’ve read about says Emmanuelle Arsan was not directing. But then, depending on what that means to you, there could have been a lot of input by her fed through to her husband who may have been more blatantly filling that role behind the scenes so… I have no idea.

The other reason I wanted to watch this one for the blog, asides from Arsan herself, is lead actress Annie Belle, who I still obsess over occasionally due to her dominant presence in Jean Rollin’s Lips Of Blood (reviewed here). Her presence is equally striking in this film and here, she’s teamed up with Al Cliver playing the photographer/moviemaker Nicholas. I think I’ve only ever seen him in Lucio Fulci horror movies to date so it was good seeing him playing something a little different to what I know him for.

The last of the four important characters from the book is Professor Gaultier Morgan, played here by Orso Maria Guerrini.

And talking of the book, it’s almost all here in the movie, which turns out to be a very straight adaptation, not missing too many details, of the original novel. Not only that but it’s very well put together with some striking cinematography. For example, a shot of Cliver’s head filling screen right completely blurred with Belle’s head filling the left hand space, equally large, while water rapidly rushes around the rocks they are laying on as a constant moving background while they converse.

Another scene where Laure and Nicholas make love while her sexual exploits, as recorded by him, are used as a backdrop to them, often dominating the screen or sharing frame space equally, is quite stunning. Ditto for a torchlit greeting as their expedition’s boat reaches the shore of their landing destination at twilight. Both tranquil and spectacular simultaneously.

And there’s some nicely rendered sexual content as well. For example, when Myrte has sex with Gaultier’s wife, there is a scene where Arsan is seen licking the long protruding blossom of a flowering plant which is resting over the other woman’s vulva, this alluding to what is going on while steering clear of the censors, with the tip of the flower she sucks as a surrogate for the other woman’s clitoris.

Now then, lets get to that big old elephant in the room of underage sex which keeps coming up to sour me every time I jump into Arsan’s legacy, out of the way. Yeah, the two little girls from the first and last part of the book are in this and, unlike the movie version of Emmanuelle (reviewed here), they are played by little girls who are roughly the same age as they are in this book. However, a sex scene with the Mara girl, Myrte and Gaultier, thankfully doesn’t make it into the final cut of the movie (thank goodness). Similarly, a scene where Laure masturbates at the tea table for the little girl cuts off just before that sequence fully plays out… although it does still include the moment where she’s staring in fascination at Laure’s exposed sex. And if you’ve already read the book… you know what’s going on. So let’s all condemn that scene and just pretend it didn’t happen. Whether any of the cast had read the book and discussions were had on set is anyone’s guess. But, moving on…

Okay, so Laure is a pretty close adaptation of the original novel. So close, in fact, that I wonder if the novel and the film didn’t gestate at the same time, such as with the movie and film versions of The Girl With All The Gifts (reviewed here and here). That being said, two of my favourite sequences from the book, the ‘wet camera’ scene** and the ‘penis tree’ scene, as detailed in yesterday’s review, don’t happen in the movie version. I wonder if they attempted them and they just looked too silly or whether they didn’t even try?

And... the ending is a little different. The book ends with Myrte, Gaultier and the disillusioned Nicholas leaving Laure, who is the only one who wants to continue in the company of the Mara tribe and take part in the festival of the new sun. And that’s a good ending. Here, we see Laure take part in that ritual and… it’s a bit of a letdown, frankly. A kind of empty coda which the film just doesn’t need, at least that’s what I think.

So that’s me done with the movie adaptation of Laure. Obvious subtext aside, it’s a pretty beautiful film with a wonderful score by Franco Micalizzi (sadly out of print on CD and I’ve so far found it impossible to source a copy, if you have any reasonably priced leads on the Digitmovies CD then let me know) and, well, Emmanuelle Arsan turns in an amazingly good performance in this too. Seeming more natural and confident in her role than much of the rest of the cast, it seems to me. So even if you are just interested in seeing it for her… yeah, definitely worth a watch if you can find a copy. This definitely needs a modern Blu Ray restoration.

*Yeah, there’s no Blu Ray as of yet and, well, it took me three different ebay sellers to finally get a copy of the old Severin DVD of the film. Two said they had it, took my money and then failed to deliver the goods!

** Thanks to Austin Gentry, who jumped onto Twitter yesterday after I'd posted my review of the novel and who is researching and writing a book about Annie Belle, for the info that, when this was still considered as a project to star Linda Lovelace, the camera scene was still in the script.