To my great surprise, cinema-goers are about to enjoy – or is it endure? – a remake of the soft porn ‘classic’ movie Emmanuelle. The plotline, such as it is, revolves around, it says here, the “tale of a young woman’s erotic adventures in Bangkok”. The main surprise to me is that these type of films are still made at all.
When the original version of Emmanuelle was first released back in 1974, there was a certain attraction in seeing a film at the cinema which included a considerable amount of unnecessary female nudity. I was young, innocent and issues like the exploitation of young women in exchange for money were beyond my levels of understanding. I genuinely never understood the joke about older men sitting in dark cinemas showing ‘erotic’ films while wearing long raincoats. Perhaps, the men were just cold?
I saw Emmanuelle on a number of occasions, once in the Netherlands where we saw what was described as “the uncensored version”, which puzzingly showed a female stripper smoking a cigarette with a part of her body that was not her mouth. I suppose it may have reduced the chances of getting lung cancer, but I would not have been impressed if she had then offered me a puff of her fag. Soft porn was for blokes who couldn’t get a girlfriend. Emmanuelle was supposed to be better than that.
For one thing, it was shown in mainstream cinemas, rather than the dodgy fleapits we had in Bristol, like the legendary Kings cinema in Old Market. Yet when we got round to seeing the film, apart from the obvious improvement in cinematic standards and its arty-farty direction, in the end it was just another soft porn film, with nothing bearing any resemblance to an actual storyline. The absence of a storyline, by the way, was welcomed, I’m sure, by people who went to see such films. It was by me. Emmanuelle went to Thailand, shagged a load of blokes and that was roughly it. Perfect, really.
The 1970s feels like a different world away. Nudity was everywhere, almost always female nudity it must be said. On telly, in newspapers (Page 3 in The Sun, in particular) and of course in movies. Today, I am not opposed in principle to naked people, but I am more accepting of the idea that there is a time and a place.
I rarely go to the cinema these days and somehow doubt that soft porn is a thing, especially since the advent of the internet provides the real thing at no cost (not that I know from personal knowledge, obviously). Yet now I read that Emmanuelle is being reimagined for a new generation of filmgoers. Will there be a market for it?
Frankly, I don’t know and don’t much care. But my feeling is there won’t be, even though this Emmanuelle falls in love with, and I am not making this up, “an enigmatic flood defences engineer”. Perhaps, I wonder, soft porn with half an eye on climate change? Now that would be the thoroughly modern way of looking at things.
Whatever next? The return of Alf Garnett, Jim Davidson, Love Thy Neighbour, the Wheeltappers and Shunters, the Black and White Minstrel Show and Jim’ll Fix It? Some things deserve to stay in the past and while a couple of hours or so of unnecessary female nudity may seem appealing, I can probably live without it. If you can’t, M&S do a very nice line in raincoats.
