(Steve Rudd)
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| Jean-Jacques! It�s not as though �EMMANUELLE� is the most controversial movie ever, but when released first in its native France - before it went global - it caused a storm, Sylvia Kristel playing the sex-experimenting, free-thinking young woman of the title� resident in Bang kok with her liberally-swinging husband who first encourages her to stray and have fun, but who then comes to resent the mindless acts she gets up to that he doesn�t know about. Perversely, it�s a huge turn-on, and a coincidence that the flick�s director is called Just Jaeckin. I bet, to some viewer�s the dialogue�s deemed �wooden,� but once super old sex guru Mario teaches Emmanuelle to allow her body to go (then her skeptical mind to follow), the sweeping, near-poetic statements he makes about love, lust and hedonism�s temptation are maturely unorthodox and a mind-massaging diversion from the frankness of the graphic lust scenes. Time and again the movie�s producers argued with film boards that it�s harmless fun: soft porn. But the rape scene that ultimately makes her a real woman - cum the end - meant one of the BBFC�s mainmen in James Fenton had to marvel at the movie repeatedly until he could decide not if it was to be X-rated or banned completely, but if the angles involved were believable. A milestone in porn again movie-making, �Emmanuelle� satisfied as many blokes as it did women, as it opened up blinkered eyes and woke up the sometimes narrow-minded to a sexual revolution where women were as free and equal as men to indulge in potentially-realistic fantasy worlds. As though life-threatening AIDS woulda-coulda-shoulda never infected them. IT�S ONLY A MOVIE (Steve Rudd) |
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