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.

 

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 2 - L’Anti-Vierge

 

Boat Full of Sea Men

Emmanuelle 2
Aka Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge
Directed by Francis Giacobetti
France 1975
Severin Films Blu Ray

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

Okay, so I enjoyed Emmanuelle 2 a little more than the first movie in the series (reviewed here). That being said, it doesn’t really play with your expectations much in that it’s more in line with what I’d expect from a soft core erotic movie of the time and, I’m sure this is probably more the film that many audiences were expecting the first film to be.

That being said, for this audience member it certainly set up unrealistic expectations because its proper French title on the print is Emmanuelle L’anti-vierge and claims to be based on that book by Emmanuelle Arsan. However, having already read that book in preparation for watching this movie (you can read my review here), I’d have to say that very little of that book works itself into the ecosystem of the film adaptation. More on that a little later.

The plot, or anti-plot in this case, since it’s almost a reboot of the previous film and it’s practically non-existent, starts with Emmanuelle getting on a boat full of sea men and then travelling on a ship, in a dormitory with a load of tempting women, to be reunited with her diplomat husband Jean, who has been away on business for a couple of months. Then, with their ‘open marriage’, the film becomes a series of sexual encounters between the two of them and various lovers.

Sylvia Kristel reprises her role as a somewhat more intelligent (it seemed to me) iteration of the character (she seems to have lost the naivete of her book incarnation to some extent here) but, this time round, her husband is played by Umberto Orsini… who seems much more likeable.

The film has fantastic cinematography and every location, with slow fluid camerawork which seems to explore the environments in order to ‘find’ the characters, looks absolutely beautiful. Needless to say (or needles to say, if commenting on the ‘sexy acupuncture’ sequence) this also goes for the sex scenes and all the actors come off well in these.

Highlights for me would be that somewhat silly but fleshly decorative acupuncture sequence, a slight scene where Emmanuelle sexes up a tattooed guy in the changing rooms of the local polo club and their sounds are expertly mingled with the sound of the match outside and the panting horses… and a six way massage scene where the two take their friend Anna-Maria (played by Catherine Rivet) to a parlour where they are laid out on three tables and given erotic, body to body massages by three women simultaneously.

And here’s the thing about that last scene I talked about. The saucy masseur who sexes up Anna-Maria is an early appearance by none other than the great Laura Gemser, who would of course begin her long, iconic run as Italy’s Black Emanuelle (with one M only, for copyright reasons) the same year.

One other scene of note is when Emmanuelle is looking through some kind of cine-viewfinder while someone takes her from behind and the BDSM, double penetration, strap-on cartoon she is watching is intercut into the sequence. I love it when live action films present prominent animated scenes as part of their make up (it’s a pretty neat cartoon actually).

Okay… so there are some problems too. A prominent character from the first book, Christopher, makes it into this movie in some scenes from that book, kinda. Anna-Maria is more baffling because she’s treated here as a completely new character, played by a different actress to the pseudo-iteration of her in the first film (who had a slightly changed character name too, if memory serves). So that’s confusing.

And a big long monologue from Jean to that character in the second book is chopped up and interspersed through three scenes, with some overlaps to other characters and versions of those sentiments from the first book. Which is actually a better way of doing it in terms of the pacing within a cinematic context, I would say.

So most of the book is gone, including some really interesting scenes, characters and locales and, I have to wonder why, since the second book seems to have many more opportunities for cinematic opulence which have all been ignored here. Certainly, Emmanuelle Arsan’s philosophy of giving oneself to anyone regardless of your own desire is not adhered to or raised here. The only moment where there is a trace of her and her husband’s outlook on life regarding that particular aspect seems to be that, after making love to three sailors (not at a prince’s party with many sailors, as in the book) in a brothel called the Jade Garden (which, again, is nothing like the secret glass palace which serves a more intense version of it in the book), she at least takes money for her services. So that, at least, is an echo of boring character Mario’s ideas (and, fortunately, he doesn’t make a similar appearance in this movie at all).

As for the vile underage sex theme which somehow subtexts the novel, I’m pleased to say it’s been circumnavigated by this version completely. Emmanuelle and Jean do, indeed, deflower Anna-Maria towards the end of the movie (both together in this version of events) but it’s clearly stated here that she’s 18 years of age… and not five years younger as in the books.

All in all, although really a lot less interesting in terms of ideas found in the book it misleadingly purports to be an adaptation of, I found Emmanuelle - L’antivierge (or Emmanuelle 2 as it is more popularly marketed as, in many countries) to be a much lighter and entertaining picture than the first although, to be fair, it does also lack the substance and gravitas of the original Emmanuelle.

 

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