Two years after receiving her Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for her film L’Événement, Audrey Diwan chose to adapt the erotic novel by Marayat Bibidh (under the pen name Emmanuelle Arsan) for the big screen. With the help of Rebecca Zlotowski in writing the film, the French director chose César-winning actress Noémie Merlant in the title role. While no release date has yet been set, a first image was revealed on Tuesday, December 19.
Before being a series of erotic films from the 70s, Emmanuelle was a novel published in 1959 – without place of publication, without author’s name, without publisher’s name and without date – telling the story of a young French woman married to a diplomat and expatriate in Bangkok. Written in the first person, Emmanuelle recounts a series of explicit erotic fantasies with several men and women, as well as with her husband. Its official version will be published in 1967.
The novel had inspired numerous adaptations for television and cinema, including a series of seven films between 1970 and 1990 in which actress Sylvia Kristel played the role of Emmanuelle five times. The first adaptation by Just Jaeckin had also enjoyed international success with nearly 9 million admissions in France in 1974.
Announced this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Audrey Diwan’s film, whose distribution rights in France were acquired by Pathé, should deviate from Just Jaeckin’s adaptation, reports the Hollywood magazine Deadline. “Female pleasure is a little-known territory that I wanted to explore,” the director confided to Première. To lead this quest, she trusted the star of Portrait of a Girl on Fire. Noémie Merlant will be surrounded by an international cast composed of Naomi Watts, Chacha Huang, Will Sharpe, Jamie Campbell Bower and Anthony Wong.
The first shot of the feature film already illustrates Audrey Diwan’s definition of eroticism: “I started to think about the location of eroticism in our society today and how we must fight against the idea sad about pornography. Eroticism is different: it comes with ideas of beauty, of sensuality, of what you show and hide,” she said in an interview published by Deadline. In this photo, Noémie Merlant is lying naked, barely covered with a sheet, on a bed in a luxury hotel room. The release date, in 2024, still remains unknown.
