Director Audrey Diwan: ‘I understand why remaking Emmanuelle is dangerous... but let them shout, I don’t care’

The name Emmanuelle was forever changed by cinema – following the release of the 1974 soft porn film, it became the byword for desire, forbidden lust and smart wicker furnishing.

For those of a certain age the name still carries those connotations, but now award-winning director Audrey Diwan has teamed up with acclaimed actress Noémie Merlant to give the film – and its heroine – a whole new spin for 2025; this time, the dirty mac brigade need not apply.

Diwan, who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for her 2021 film Happening, was, unsurprisingly sceptical when her producers gave her the original novel, by Marayat Rollet-Andriane, initially circulated pseudonymously in the late Fifties.

The director – who was described as part of the new generation of female filmmakers “reinventing the codes and redefining the boundaries of international cinema” when she was named president of the jury of Cannes Critics’ Week in 2023 – says, “I wanted to read it out of curiosity. I had heard about Emmanuelle for ages, but I’d never seen it… I thought I wasn’t the audience; well, I obviously wasn’t the audience.”

While the book was full of attitudes of the time, it still surprised her. “It’s the story of a young girl who wants to find pleasure, and she says it out loud; she is the subject of her own story. So I guess when it was published it was a revolution.”

Still, she turned it down. “I told the producers, ‘Thank you very much, it’s very interesting… I’m not going to do the movie.”

But something nagged about the project, about how to tell an erotic story in 2025 and make it cinematic. “When the first one was made, everyone wanted to see more,” she says. “Now, we’re in post-pornography times. Everybody has seen everything. So I was like, ‘What if I narrow the frame? Can I ask the audience to think about the girl offscreen?’

“But it was still not a reason to make a movie. Then a month after, I was still thinking about this woman who doesn’t have pleasure… and that’s when I started to see my Emmanuelle. I called them back and said, ‘I’m going to make the film.’”

The title brings with it huge cultural baggage, especially in France where the original, starring Sylvia Kristel, ran for years in cinemas and became one of the country’s most successful films. It sparked a series of sequels, some official, some less so, such as a US TV series called Emmanuelle in Space.

So how did Diwan feel about taking a challenge like this? “I was scared and excited which is how I pick a topic,” Diwan says. “I understand why it’s dangerous. I probably undermined what this name means for a lot of people.

“Nowadays in France, not so many people have seen the movie but everyone has it as a reference, and the reference is [the image of] a nearly naked girl lying on this chair. It’s a definition of sensuality that goes beyond the original movie… I realised after making the movie that it would shock the audience to take that name and turn it into something quite modern.”

When she started writing and researching, she realised something strange.

“In France we are in the post-sex era. Young people don’t want to have sex or touch each other, they’re having less and less sex. I was like, ‘OK, this is the quest of a woman who wants to go back to pleasure, but in a world where people don’t want to touch each other.’”

Diwan continues, “I can only write something I strongly feel myself. I felt that our sexuality is changing quite fast, but I couldn’t put a name on it. So writing is always a fascinating process because I created that girl and then I had to follow and see how difficult it is for people to connect these days.”

The character was developed with the star Noémie Merlant, who won huge acclaim in the 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire and is herself a director – and she had no qualms about taking on the character. “Noémie is brave and she is very adventurous. I don’t think she knew Emmanuelle because she’s a bit younger.”

The film, which also stars Naomi Watts and Will Sharpe, follows Emmanuelle who is assessing a luxury Hong Kong hotel for the owners. She is isolated, alone and unable to feel pleasure as she seeks sexual encounters with strangers.

“It is clear that there’s broken desire. You can think you’re involved but suddenly you’re not there,” Diwan says. Emmanuelle’s journey is to reconnect with herself and find the sexual pleasure she’s lost.

“Noémie told me she felt the same as Emmanuelle, that for a long time she couldn’t feel any pleasure. We talked about sexual pleasure. And that’s why she also wanted to be Emmanuelle because she had to explore, go back to her body, she knows about that quest.”

Diwan said looking back she doesn’t think it’s random that she wrote this, alongside Rebecca Złotowski, after winning the Golden Lion when she was suddenly in the spotlight. “You can’t feel pleasure if you perform, or are trying to be at your best. To me it’s the opposite. I felt frozen inside if I have to be perfect, which I’m absolutely not. If I pretend or try, I’m losing pleasure.”

This comes out just a week after Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman, another film about a woman’s voyage of sexual discovery. Diwan thinks now is the right time to tell these stories from a female point of view. “I see this as a gigantic field where we’ve never been. There are so many stories about sexuality from our point of view that were never told, so I think it’s exciting.”

Diwan didn’t want to make a titillating soft porn film for the male gaze, “I needed to tell this story about broken desire because I see that many girls feel that way.” Still the inference was it should appeal to men’s desires and excite male audiences. “Not everyone but some men made me feel it would only be Emmanuelle if I accepted the idea of playing that game. But that’s a good reason to do it – let them shout I really don’t care.”

She continues, “I felt I needed to explore something, and to say out loud things that are not easy to say about female sexuality… Forget the original Emmanuelle and follow that girl because she’s going in a direction you probably haven’t been before, watching a movie. It sounds presumptuous but I just created the movie I probably needed as a woman at the moment, with a topic I haven’t seen much on screen.”

While there are sex scenes, they do not overwhelm the film like its predecessor. “I don’t think eroticism is about sexual sequences,” Dawan says. “It’s about an atmosphere. It’s a silence between two people, the way the brush against each other in corridors.”

The character is largely trapped in in a luxury hotel because it’s the “perfect, ideal fake place where people pretend to have relationships and don’t really exchange anything”.

The setting also evokes a recent show that looks at these settings and the people who stay in them: The White Lotus. So was it a reference? “It has to be, I have Will Sharpe with me!” she says of the actor who played Ethan in The White Lotus’ second season. “I love the idea of luxury and closed places. I think it’s good for drama to see how people connect, or not.”

Emmanuelle is in cinemas from Friday and then available to stream from January 24th