“The most absolute nothing, not even the sex scenes are surprising anymore”

I told you at the beginning of my weekly collaborations on these pages that I would not always talk to you about recommendations and this is the time to tell you a real mess that returns an erotic myth to cinema from the 70s, Emmanuelle. The original from 1974 was already a bad film, although it revolutionized viewers of the time due to its high erotic content, which bordered on porn, causing not only a sensation but causing real scandals wherever it was released. In Spain we had to wait a little longer because of the censorship of the time.

Numerous articles attempted to explain the phenomenon, generating comments and being the center of conversations. New versions were even made, without the success of the first, because if the original was bad, the following ones were unfathomable. The director Audrey Diwan and the actress Noémie Merlant have decided to go back to their old ways and make this thing boring, pretentious and supposedly modern with which they have inaugurated the San Sebastián International Film Festival. Was there really nothing better or were they trying to be more modern than anyone else and bring the supposed scandal that may cause so that people talk about it?

At the time of writing these lines I don’t know anything about the critical reaction to the film, and the truth is that it doesn’t keep me up at night either. I had enough with the almost two hours long of a film that barely tells anything and I had the feeling, without being a porn lover, that some of these movies have more plot than the aforementioned Emmanuelle.

The first sequence pays homage to the original, reliving the protagonist’s first sexual encounter in the bathroom of a plane while traveling to Hong Kong. There she will stay in a luxury hotel, property of the company for which she works as a supervisor to ensure that everything works as dictated by her bosses, who want to eliminate the director whom they consider unfit. Character played by an immense actress like Naomi Watts, but what is she doing in this thing? I can’t believe it’s just for money, since they would have had to put a lot of zeros in his account to accept.

Well, as I was going, the protagonist will find in the hotel everything she needs for her sexual instincts: threesomes, masturbation with another woman, encounters with a man who wants nothing to do with her and with whom she ends up becoming fascinated – we still wonder why. – and so on. The worst thing is that it doesn’t matter.

The interpretation of Its main actress is cold and distant and of course without the angel or beauty of her predecessor, Sylvia Kristel. I know that some will tell me that the character is more modern, that if the feminine power, that if… well, and that if everything is in the most absolute nothingness. If I had to give it a grade it would be a zero. Movies like this should not only not be released but, most importantly, made. Please don’t bite, you’ll thank me.

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