EMMANUELLE (1974)/EMMANUELLE II (1975) All-Region Blu-ray
Director(s): Just Jaeckin/Francis Giacobetti
Umbrella Entertainment

Umbrella Entertainment's down-under pairing of EMMANUELLE and EMMANUELLE 2 shows audiences that "X was never like this with their double feature Blu-ray.

Based on the novel purportedly self-penned by Emmanuelle Arsan, aka Marayat Rollet-Andriane, wife of French diplomat Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane (who reportedly really wrote the book and its follow-ups), EMMANUELLE opens with its titular heroine (Sylvia Kristel, PRIVATE LESSONS) traveling from Paris to Thailand to join her husband Jean (Daniel Sarky) who has rented the country home of a princess for her stay. While Jean is off on business, Emmanuelle learns from the other diplomats' wives that "boredom is our only enemy" and that there is little more to do than play tennis or squash, travel the canals, or make love. Although Emmanuelle resists the lesbian attentions of fellow diplomat's wife Ariane (Jeanne Colletin, SHOCK TREATMENT) but is drawn to uninhibited, young Marie-Ange (Christine Boisson, THE TRUTH ABOUT CHARLIE) who prefers older men like Emmanuelle's husband and introduces her to bisexual Mario (Alain Cuny, LA DOLCE VITA) who espouses a philosophy of eroticism that "Love between couples should be outlawed. Every act of love must include a third person." When Emmanuelle stands up Mario to run off on a week-long countryside jaunt with archaeologist Bee (Marika Green, RIDER ON THE RAIN), Jean is not so much jealous as humiliated that his wife has chosen to betray him with another woman. When Bee does not return the depth of Emmauelle's love for her, Emmanuelle returns in tears and is pushed by Jean in this vulnerable state under the influence of Mario who he and Ariane assumes will turn her on to the pursuit of pleasure as a diversion; but Mario has other plans to carry his philosophy through to new levels with Emmanuelle.

Europe was no stranger to softcore erotica by the mid-seventies, although many of them wound up stateside in lower-tier theaters from distributors whose erotic product audiences may have found difficult to distinguish in its marketing from hardcore American films. EMMANUELLE's dubbed and subtitled releases X-rated from Columbia Pictures and its literary source – with a Grove Press tie-in – however, gave it a pull that brought audiences to it as the sort of <i>cause célèbre</i> that THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES had been the year before when critics were tripping over themselves to promote it as a refined work of adult entertainment. The English dub was produced stateside by Paulette Rubinstein who had also produced dubs for Columbia Pictures' releases of SWEPT AWAY and THE TALL BLOND MAN WITH ONE BROWN SHOE. The film's international splash not only spawned a line of official but mostly unrelated sequels but also changed the direction of European erotic filmmaking with various imitators from the BLACK EMANUELLE series to one-offs titled after their female lead characters usually visiting exotic locales and finding sex. Emmanuelle is something very different than what one finds in most films of the ilk; neither a virgin nor a fully liberated woman. She accepts that her husband has other lovers and expects that of her, she is inhibited but not a prude. She poses for nude photographs by a gay photographer, and has a distinction between taking other lovers and betraying her husband; the latter meaning to hide or lie. While the other women get a charge out of the idea of deceiving their husbands, Emmanuelle keeps her two encounters on the plane to Thailand a secret from her husband not out of shame but as an experience of her own. She sees her husband as father and teacher, and that sex is more than pleasure but an extension of the bond they share. If the ending feels a bit low-key and anti-climactic, it is because it is mean to signify the real beginning of Emmanuelle's journey of erotic understanding. Fashion photographer Jaeckin has an eye for composition and the film's strengths lie in its combination of nudity and backdrops (sets and locations); indeed, the film initially played like a series of setups for soft-focus fashion stills. In retrospect, the film is better-plotted than it once seemed, but the philosophical angle battles for the audience attention with the striking visual set-ups and sex scenes that are more explicitly performed than actually depicted onscreen. Jaeckin would strike more of a balance between visual style and fidelity to literary source in his follow-up THE STORY OF O which gives Pauline Reage's source novel the look and feel of an erotic fairytale. Beside Kristel, of equal contribution to the film's success is the score of Pierre Bachelet – who also scored Jaeckin's STORY OF O and GWENDOLINE – who recorded a theme song in French and English for the film.

Kristel returns in EMMANUELLE 2 joining her engineer husband Jean (Umberto Orsini, THE TEMPTER) in Hong Kong. They have reached an understanding about each other's freedom to pursue pleasure with others so long as neither falls in love; that does not mean, however, that Emmanuelle is not a bit jealous when he discovers that Jean has been sleeping around with Laura (Florence Lafuma), the mistress of UNESCO cultural arts representative Peter (Tom Clark, BLACK OAK CONSPIRACY); however, the pressure to socialize with the couple leads Emmanuelle and Jean to a mutual crush on Peter's dancer daughter Anna-Maria (Catherine Rivet). Anna-Maria proves as naïve to Emmauelle's and Jean's philosophy of pleasure as handsome young smuggler Christopher (Frédéric Lagache) – another crush for Emmanuelle, and possibly for her husband – simply refuses to understand it. Dispending entirely with the text of Emmanuelle Arsan's follow-up novel, EMMANUELLE 2 is a bigger-budgeted, lusher-looking, and more eventful but also more episodic. Perhaps more influential on the BLACK EMANUELLE series than the first film, it is an erotic travelogue of Hong Kong with sexual encounters at Royal Police Force polo games (Kristel and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD's Venantinto Venantini sporting a full body tattoo), traditional dance classes (Kristel and EYES OF LAURA MARS' Sterling St. Jacques as a black choreographer while viewing a coin-operated erotic arcade show), a spa with a trio of masseuses including BLACK EMANUELLE's Laura Gemser (who was discovered by photographer-turned-director Franco Giacobetti), acupuncture-assisted masturbation, a visit to an exclusive brothel where women are paid with casino chips and Emmanuelle turns the johns into her clients in a four-way, and of course the easy availability of the household staff (MADAME CLAUDE's Claire Richard) as elegantly photographed in Panavision by Robert Fraisse (RONIN) and electronically-scored by the great Francis Lai (ANIMA PERSA). Just as Orsini's Jean is less stuffy and rakishly charming, Kristel's Emmanuelle is more self-assured and self-possessed but also more cynical as when she is turned on hearing a fellow passenger (Caroline Laurence, NINE GUESTS FOR A CRIME) recount her traumatic rape by three girls in boarding school which she later dismisses as boring when recounting to Jean. There is no romantic tension between the couple as Christopher never seems a threat while Anna-Maria is destined to share a bed with both of them; and yet, the film ends on a shot that exudes melancholy while the end credits are accompanied by a theme song voiced by Kristel in French and English versions depending on the dub. EMMANUELLE 2 would be followed up by GOODBYE, EMMANUELLE from actor-turned-director François Leterrier which also carried over Orsini as Jean and boasted a Serge Gainsbourg theme song to lesser success when Miramax put it out in the states in 1981. French producer Alain Siritzky got the rights to EMMANUELLE and produced four more sequels with Kristel bowing out of the series written into the 3D part IV, Monique Gabrielle taking the lead in the troubled fifth installment partially directed by Walerian Borowczyk, pinup Natalie Uher taking over in EMMANUELLE 6 which was started by editor Bruno Zincone and reshaped with a wraparound by Jean Rollin (FASCINATION) – the latter three parts were released in both softcore and hardcore insert versions – and a seventh lesser-seen theatrical entry from Francis Leroi that launched a seven-film TV movie series that went straight to video in most territories featuring Kristel guesting as "Old Emmanuelle" when the directorial efforts of husband Philippe Blot including the trio THE ARROGANT (for Cannon for whom she had previously made MATA HARI with Curtis Harrington), BORN WILD, and HOT BLOOD. Siritzky then launched a series of made-for-cable EMMANUELLE series stateside (some of them in collaboration with Roger Corman and later Rolfe Kanefsky): the eight-film EMMANUELLE IN SPACE with Krista Allen (LIAR LIAR), the six-film EMMANUELLE 2000 with Holly Sampson (LADY CHATTERLEY'S STORIES), the six-film EMMANUELLE: THE PRIVATE COLLECTION with Natasja Vermeer (PRIVATE MOMENTS), and EMMANUELLE THROUGH TIME with adult star Allie Haze amidst other series like THE SEX FILES, SCANDAL, PASSION AND ROMANCE, and CLICK (based on the Milo Manera comic strip after a 1985 feature film that like EMMANUELLE 5 was the subject of reshoots for its American release by Corman's New Horizons and post-production supervisor Steve Barnett). Arsan and her husband would be directly involved in Ovidio G. Assonits' LAURE which was released stateside as FOREVER EMMANUELLE.

Following its theatrical release, EMMANUELLE had a dubbed, fullscreen VHS and CED/laserdisc release from Columbia stateside while EMMANUELLE 2 was picked up by Paramount for an X-rated dubbed release titled EMMANUELLE, THE JOYS OF A WOMAN and subsequently released to cropped Paramount VHS and laserdisc – the Japanese could be depended upon for multiple letterboxed laserdiscs but they would have fogged frontal nudity – with the first half-way decent editions out from Fox Lorber in 1998 with non-anamorphic letterboxed editions featuring English and French audio and subtitles. These editions were superseded by Anchor Bay Entertainment's 2003 THE EMMANUELLE COLLECTION featuring GOODBYE, EMMANUELLE as a box set exclusive while the first two films also got solo releases featuring anamorphic transfers, English and French tracks, subtitles, and Kristel interviews. When EMMANUELLE was remastered in HD, the first film got a 2007 special edition DVD release from Lions Gate with a new featurette while other territories got a Blu-ray release through Studio Canal.

Umbrella's all-region double feature derives its transfers from the Studio Canal masters which popped up in English-friendly editions in France, Italy, and Germany last decade. EMMANUELLE's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfer is a massive improvement over the DVDs, revealing the essential textures of slick, pale and tanned skin, the bed mosquito netting that diffuses the lighting and semi-obscures the bodies behind it without getting confused by the encoder with the film grain, and images that are soft focus but no longer seem out of focus. The French DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono soundtrack sounds fuller than the English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track, with Bachelet's theme song appears in French and English respectively, and optional English subtitles are available. EMMANUELLE 2's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen looks a bit contrasty during the opening credits opticals, but the image shapes up afterwards and offers up a dated but relatively crisp presentation given the original photography which looks sharper than the first film but some slight glow around the bright whites are indicative of a degree of diffusion rather than digital filtering (although there has been some as symptomatic of an older HD master). The other Blu-rays of EMMANUELLE included the documentary "An Erotic Success" on the history of the film in France, along with an interview with producer Yves Rousset-Rouard and Jaeckin – although not the Lions Gate-exclusive documentary "Soft Sell" which focused on the film's success in America – as well as the film's trailer. Umbrella's is barebones but an all-around solid release as a double feature. (Eric Cotenas)

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