Emmanuelle’s Revenge – La revanche d’Emmanuelle (1992)

Directed by: Francis Leroi | 88 minutes | drama, romance | Actors: Marcela Walerstein, George Lazenby, Sylvia Kristel, Joel Bui, Jay Hausman, Pham Duc-Tu, Daniel Hung Meas, Vibbe Haugaard, Toby Senegal, Sénégal Fratini, Natala Sevenants, Jean Pierre de Varenne, Robert Terry Lee, Corinne Mafiodo, Lauren Song

The ‘Emmanuelle’ phenomenon has its origins in Emmanuelle Arsan’s book ‘The Joys of a Woman’, but has since splintered into many inconsiderable films. Wikipedia tells us that the role was first played by Erika Blanc in the movie ‘Io, Emmanuelle’ (1969), but the voluptuous lady became really famous with our own Sylvia Kristel, who was allowed to shock with ‘Emmanuelle’ from 1974 and the follow up on this. From the 1980s, Kristel left the sex scenes to more youthful actresses, but she kept popping up as the older Emmanuelle, looking back on her exciting life. Also in ‘Emmanuelle’s Revenge’.

This 1992 film is part of a series of seven Emmanuelle films in which Marcela Walerstein plays Emmanuelle. The main idea of ​​the series is told in the pre-movie: “In the sacred mountains of Tibet, Emmanuelle was chosen to become the incarnation of all women”. A completely unbelievable and brilliant idea for an erotic film that wants to appeal to women as well as men, because in this way many different naked women can be shown who are all part of the same ‘heroine’. Emmanuelle thus becomes a symbol for female sexuality and the power that comes with it. But to put it that way is very pompous for such a rubbish film as ‘Emmanuelle’s Revenge’.

It seems as if this film overestimates itself for a moment when the first female lead character, Charlamaine (an African with blue colored lenses, who is rather poorly dubbed), starts talking in nonsense wisdom and doesn’t stop (she says: “I’m like words: lots of different meanings, but not much sense”). But in all likelihood, the main goal of the film is to present the viewer with quite a few erotic scenes, at reasonable intervals. That’s why it’s so strange that the storyline is still so complex. Thanks in part to the crappy dialogues (“’How are you?’ ‘I’m mad! I’m angry! I’m so angry!!’”) and the aforementioned fact that Emmanuelle can take any female form, you touch the wire completely off. Suddenly Charlamaine has disappeared and not much later we are in Mexico, where an actress tries to find out whether her co-star in a war film is gay or not. We just as easily leave that storyline for the adventures of the women in Mario’s life (he is rather passive himself). And then there’s the frame story of old Emmanuelle and Mario telling each other stories on an airplane. At the end of the film you still wonder what that ‘revenge’ was that the film should have been about.

Of course it’s not about the story, but about exciting soft porn pictures of beautiful women and the film succeeds in that. The way in which images are edited in a completely different style throughout the sex scenes is despicable: mating savanna beasts, African children tamping grain and (the pinnacle) black-and-white war images. If you take that away, you’re left with a few sex scenes that can be called quite exciting, precisely because you don’t see any penetration (most men keep their underpants neatly on). Whether that is enough reason to watch ‘Emmanuelle, the Revenge’ remains the question, however.