Director Audrey Diwan: ‘I understand why remaking Emmanuelle is dangerous... but let them shout, I don’t care’
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The name Emmanuelle was forever changed by cinema – following the release of the 1974 soft porn film, it became the byword for desire, forbidden lust and smart wicker furnishing. For those of a certain age the name still carries those connotations, but now award-winning director Audrey Diwan has teamed up with acclaimed actress Noémie Merlant to give the film – and its heroine – a whole new spin for 2025; this time, the dirty mac brigade need not apply.
Diwan, who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for her 2021 film Happening, was, unsurprisingly sceptical when her producers gave her the original novel, by Marayat Rollet-Andriane, initially circulated pseudonymously in the late Fifties. The director – who was described as part of the new generation of female filmmakers “reinventing the codes and redefining the boundaries of international cinema” when she was named president of the jury of Cannes Critics’ Week in 2023 – says, “I wanted to read it out of curiosity. I had heard about Emmanuelle for ages, but I’d never seen it… I thought I wasn’t the audience; well, I obviously wasn’t the audience.”.
While the book was full of attitudes of the time, it still surprised her. “It’s the story of a young girl who wants to find pleasure, and she says it out loud; she is the subject of her own story. So I guess when it was published it was a revolution.”.
