Laure (aka Forever Emmanuelle)

Emm-Annie-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.

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

Emmanuelle - the novel

 

Swinging Thailand

Emmanuelle
By Emmanuelle Arsan
Translated by Lowell Bair
Harper Perrenial
ISBN 9780007300402

Trigger warning: Taboo and illegal practices discussed and suitably condemned. 

Marryat Rollett-Andruane was a Thai-French woman who, in 1956, married a French diplomat called Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane. They settled in Thailand and their hedonistic lifestyle apparently gave birth to the swinger scene in that country. She was also an actress (and allegedly director), which I’ll probably get into in a later review but, under another name, she stars with Steve McQueen in the movie The Sand Pebbles (and quite possibly had him as one of the notches on her belt.. or below it at least). In 1959 she allegedly wrote and, certainly had published (originally anonymously), a novel apparently based on her real life sexual encounters called Emmanuelle. My understanding is that the book was banned and the publisher did some jail time for it (not sure where I read that as I can’t find that info now but I’m pretty sure that’s what I read and now I’ve read the actual novel I can better understand why that might have happened… yeah, I’ll get to that later).

In the late 60s the book was unbanned and published under her pen name Emmanuelle Arsan but, it’s alleged that her husband actually wrote the book. Personally I think this might have been a collaborative work because of the way the book is paced and, there’s also some evidence recently to suggest that may be the truth of the matter… yeah, I’ll ge to that pacing issue soon enough. 

Now I wanted to read this before I embarked on Severin’s small set of the white Emmanuelle films but, I really didn’t know what I was letting myself in for here. It wasn’t the explicit erotic elements that gave me pause for thought here… I’m all for that. Nope, it was another big element of the book which seemingly permeates the majority of the attitudes of the characters which both surprised me and made me wonder why this book is a) still published and b) hailed as an erotic masterpiece. Yeah, I’ll get to that element soon because I’m torn right now about wanting to call the book out for what it also is and... the idea that doing that might in some way endanger the publication of this blog. I’ll need to word this carefully at first… I think.

Okay, so the first impression I had as I started the tale, which tells of the French diplomat’s wife going to stay with him in Thailand and embarking on a polymorphous sexual journey (ha, I’m already being diplomatic with my wording) was that it’s full of sex. More than I’d expected… at first. Including the opening sex on a plane which I believe starts off the movie version and which I know starts off the movie Black Emanuelle (with one M to evade copyright problems… reviews will eventually be coming of that strand of films, is the plan). 

Now, some reviewers have called the book badly written but I disagree. I think it’s very well written and has a nice, almost poetic turn of phrase about it. For instance, rather than say such and such character laughed at her question, the book phrases it thusly… “This question let her discover Bee’s laugh!” And things like a woman’s sexual regions might be referred to as, say, her Astrakhan triangle. And the quality of the written sex is also pretty well done for erotica. I recently read a much lauded piece of erotic source for another review coming soon at some point here and the text was absolutely terribly written (cough… Behind The Green Door… cough) and this book is like Dickens compared to that stuff. A blow job, as given in the first half of the book, is rendered beautifully with words, for example. So I was actually fairly impressed by the writing. Although, since it’s translated from the French, one has to wonder if the skill of the writing lies in the original written word or the translator… something I’m sure I’ll never know.

Okay… then the book takes a turn for the worse. The sex disappears and a character called Mario enters the story. And then we get maybe 60 or more pages of unbelievably boring and terrible philosophy on the nature of eroticism. To say it’s dull would be an understatement. It’s stops the book stone cold and leaves it to die. It’s why I believe that maybe it was a husband and wife collaboration… with one writing the first half and one writing the other half.  It’s also at this point that you kind of realise how easily malleable and changeable the lead character’s mental outlook is. She seems somewhat fickle to the point of instability as each new sexual encounter… most of them open ended and not resolved in this particular text... takes place.

Now then, I’m calling this book out now because… well... I was surprised that a lot of the sexual encounters and discussions in the book take place within the company of minors. Underage sex is happening here and, though the victims of this are not portrayed as such, usually dominating and instigating some of the sexual content, it’s quite unsettling and makes me question the legality of the book (and makes me wonder just how far the film must deviate from the source to be allowed a cinema release… I guess I’ll find out soon). But, yeah, while it’s not all the book it certainly is an underlying part of the tale and it does not shy away from scenes of sexuality involving, well, youngsters. I’m astonished this book has been hailed as a classic and I’m just not sure what’s going on here… nor why the majority of the short snippet reviews on Amazon I quickly scanned to see if other people were calling it out, rarely mention this insidious aspect of the book, if at all. 

And that’s me done with the first Emmanuelle book, I think. While the book is quite engaging for the most part and offers surrealistic imagery such as an orchard of wooden penises hanging from the trees… the other stuff I mentioned in the last paragraph is a real deal breaker and I’d find it hard to recommend this thing to anybody. Now I have to see what’s happening in the movie version, I guess. I’m sure that element must have been stripped out of the tale, such as it is (more a series of episodic encounters than a tale, truth be told). 

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection