WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Black Emanuelle

Bitto Albertini’s arthouse classic is at one and the same time a celebration of female empowerment and a searing indictment of post-colonial hypocrisy. The intricate and multi-layered narrative involves a crusading journalist who …

Okay, my wife’s left the room. Here’s the real review:

‘Black Emanuelle’ is about a photographer named Mae Jordan (Laura Gemser), known by the mononym Emanuelle, who goes to Africa on an assignment, meets bohemian writer Ann (Karin Schubert), gets into the swing of things (I use the word “swing” in all its connotations) with Ann’s groovy friends and has a lot of sex.

This probably makes ‘Black Emanuelle’ sound infinitely more entertaining than it actually is.

For a film whose raison d’etre is the naked and voluptuous figure of its leading lady, it takes half an hour – a third of its running time – for Emanuelle to get down to a full-on sexual encounter (a bit of canoodling in a car and a quick fondle in a shower notwithstanding). What we’re treated to in the interim is endless scenes of Ann and her cohorts being fashionably outrageous. These guys party hard: we’re talking J&B necked straight from the bottle and everybody jumping in the swimming pool at the end of the evening. Yeah, baby!

Emanuelle gets the hots for Ann’s narcissistic husband Gianni (Angelo Infanti), introduced in the following hilariously awful exchange:

Ann: This is my husband, Gianni.
Emanuelle: Are you English?
Gianni: No, I’m Italian.

Yeah: fine English name, Gianni. But then again, this is a film where Ann meets Emanuelle at the airport with the line “I expected a man”, to which Emanuelle replies “On the contrary, I’m a woman.” A statement of the obvious on par with the scene in which Emanuelle and Ann fly out to the veldt in a Cessna and Emanuelle makes the following observation: “I’ve never been in a small plane before. It’s not like a 707, is it?” And while I’m on the subject of how fucking bad the script is, let us not forget these two howlers: “that’s the fascination of Africa, it’s like an incurable disease” and “the monkey stole my toothpaste”, both of which are worthy to keep the company of “I’m not happy with the fenestration” and “I chipped my tooth on a Quaalude” in the lexicon of bog-awful movie lines.

But I digress. Emanuelle takes a shine to Gianni. I would describe what ensues as the eternal triangle, except that Gianni has a history with Gloria (Isabelle Marchall), the party slut wife of Gianni’s best buddy Richard (Gabriele Tinti), which makes it more like the eternal quadrangle. Except that Ann, aware of Gianni’s philanderings, is carrying a torch for sensitive academic and musician Professor Kamau (Don Powell), so the eternal pentagon would probably be a better description. Except that Emanuelle complicates things by making out with both Ann and Gloria, which I guess makes it the eternal … Oh fuck it, let’s just call it the eternal polygon and have done with it. (Hell, if I tried to go the whole hog with this thing and factor in the hockey team gang-bang on the train at the end – don’t ask! – I don’t think I could find a shape with enough sides to fit the bill.)

Damn! I’m doing it again – I’m making this movie sound a far better prospect than is really the case.

The truth of the matter is, ‘Black Emanuelle’ is a tedious and unlovely piece of filmmaking. And there are many things that make it thus. There’s the bland cinematography which reduces the Africa landscapes to a backdrop; wallpaper. There’s the totally random editing, as if the film had been assembled by a martian with no understanding of the language of cinema or the functionality of an editing machine. There’s the misguided use of slo-mo when Emanuelle and Ann decide to take pictures of each other in the buff out in the veldt; the sight of the rather well-proportioned Karin Schubert leaping over a succession of fallen branches with whatever constitutes the diametric opposite of gazelle-like grace is almost surreal. Then there’s the general uselessness of the sex scenes. This is a big failing in a movie that’s primarily about making the beast with two backs. Emanuelle and Gianni’s trysts consist of nothing more than two naked people writhing as if in the throes of St Vitus’ Dance.

What is potentially the most erotic scenario, a languid poolside girl-girl encounter between Emanuelle and Gloria, is spectacularly de-eroticized by Albertini’s insistence on continually cutting away to a gardener and a maid spying on them. Both are sufficiently turned on to enjoy a quick fumble themselves. Problem is, the maid looks like Ugly Betty and the gardener has the kind of face your normally see in identikit photographs when the police are tracking down a child-molester. Albertini effects an even less classy bit of cross-cutting during the railway carriage gang-bang. He cross-cuts between the group sesh in second class and the lubricated and shiny piston rod plunging into and out of the cylinder box. The action is curiously reminiscent of … nah, surely not!

Okay, I’ve spent way too long on this POS. Plus that last paragraph included the phrases “languid poolside girl-girl encounter”, “quick fumble” and “railway carriage gang-bang”, none of which I envisaged using on this blog just a few weeks ago. Time to wrap this review up, I think.

I only need to mention one more thing: the music. It’s fucking horrible. The theme song, which is recycled endlessly throughout the movie, has a tuneless singer crooning “sweet Emanuelle” during the saccharine chorus, but truncating the four syllables of Emanuelle into three to fit the rhythm. This harmonically-challenged individual also displays limited capability with the English language, so that “sweet Emanuelle” comes out sounding “sweaty man well”. I spent half of this god-awful movie wondering what a “sweaty man well” actually is and coming up with some very disturbing possibilities.

I’m skipping ‘Black Emanuelle 2’ since Laura Gemser’s not in it. Tomorrow, I’ll be engaging with the first of Joe D’Amato’s franchise entries. May the god that I don’t believe in have mercy on my wretched soul just for typing this, but I’m looking to Joe D’Amato for an upgrade in quality. Joe fucking D’Amato!!!

O come, o come, Emanuelle

When Just Jaeckin’s profound and sensitive examination of one woman’s sexual liberation soft porn flick ‘Emmanuelle’ garnered critical encomium made a fuckton of money worldwide, a sequel was inevitable. With Francis Giacobetti in the director’s chair this time, ‘Emmanuelle 2’ (or ‘Emmanuelle: the Anti-Virgin’) followed its predecessor’s soft-focus formula to the tee. Nonetheless, it’s the better film for one reason and one reason only: the massage scene.

The set-up is quite simple: Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) and friends visit a Bangkok massage parlour where they are soaped up, rinsed off and and given what you might euphemistically call a full body massage by three incredibly nubile, supple and curvaceous Filipino girls. For about five minutes. (Go here for an excerpt from the scene. Warning: it’s NSFW and then some!)

What gives the scene that added zing is that one of the masseuses is played by Laura Gemser. In the same year that ‘Emmanuelle 2’ was made – 1975 – Gemser appeared in the title role in Bitto Albertini’s ‘Black Emanuelle’ (note the ever-so-slight but lawsuit-avoiding difference in spelling). In a life imitating art soft porn imitating soft porn scenario, ‘Black Emanuelle’ did enough box office that Albertini went ahead with ‘Black Emanuelle 2’. Gemser was unavailable, so he cast Sharon Lesley.

And there the story might have ended. But for the supreme and indefatigable cinematic talent that was Joe D’Amato. (That was me being sarcastic, by the way.) Born Aristide Massaccesi, he made quite a name for himself as a cinematographer before launching a directorial career. It kind of sets the pattern that his first half dozen or so movies were either uncredited or directed under pseudonyms. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, he made only two features under his own name, the first of which was the flawed but watchable giallo ‘Death Smiled at a Murderer’.

The rest of his filmography – clocking in at over 200 titles! – was pseudonymous. Covering just about every genre from sword and sandal to spaghetti western to (at the fag end of his career) hard core pornography, he utilized at least 40 pseudonyms. I say “at least”: it’s a popular theory amongst D’Amato aficionados that there remain any number of unattributed D’Amato films simply because his entire oeuvre of pseudonyms has not been fully catalogued.

Still, it was as Joe D’Amato he was best known, and under that name he gave the world that staple of the video nasties list ‘Anthropophagus: The Beast’, that tender and delicate drama of human relationships and sexual identity ‘11 Days, 11 Nights’ and that marvel of genre deconstruction and cross-pollination ‘Porno Holocaust’.

Yes, Joe D’Amato made a film called ‘Porno Holocaust’. Holding up the one bloody and tattered piece of integrity I still possess, waving it undefeated above the fetid swamp of the last four weeks on this blog, I can say with pride that I have never seen ‘Porno Holocaust’. I have, however, read a couple of reviews online. That’s the wonderful thing about the internet: there are people out there who will blog definitive reviews on the films of Albert Pyun, argue Tommy Wiseau as a misunderstood, ahead-of-his-time genius, and expend a couple of thousand words on the post-modern, anti-audience imperative of ‘Two Girls, One Cup’. I’m proud to be a part of the movement. Ahem. I digress. Point is, while I value what is left of my soul enough to continue being content not to have seen ‘Porno Holocaust’, I understand from what I’ve read that it’s a hybrid desert island/radioactive mutant/slasher/sexploitation flick. Starring George Eastman.

There is a little part of my mind that turns into an exploding catherine wheel festooning the inside of my skull with gold, crimson and silver contrails purely at the thought that this film even exists. There is a slightly larger part of me, located roughly between the lower intestine and the sphincter muscle, that lurches sickly at the same thought.

So: Joe D’Amato. The man who took up the reins of the Black Emanuelle franchise. A man with no conscience, no remorse; a man who was to cinema what Jack the Ripper was to escort agencies. What excise men were to illegal stills hidden in the highlands of Scotland. What Guy N. Smith is to the Booker Prize. What Aqua’s ‘Barbie Doll’ is to grand Italian opera. What Lindsay Lohan is to a “just say no” campaign. What Tony Blair and George W. Bush are to the truth.

Anyway, you get the picture. Joe D’Amato = cheap exploitation.

Joe D’Amato made the next five Black Emanuelle films, even going so far as to bequeath unto future film historians the penultimate of the cycle – ‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ – under his birth name. It was just plain old Joe D’Amato on the others, and it was as Joe D’Amato that he steered Black Emanuelle into the realms of sexual violence, contentious content and hardcore inserts that Ms Gemser was quick to point out she never knew about or participated in.

In addition, a further eight ‘Emanuelle’ titles, starring Laura Gemser, were made between 1976 and 1983, by such masters of world cinema as Mario Bianchi and Bruno Mattei. (If I mention that Bianchi was responsible for ‘Satan’s Baby Doll’ and Mattei for ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’, that should tell you all you need to know.)

This gives us a total of 15 Black Emanuelle movies. But since I doubt my sanity or my wife’s patience would survive a fortnight-long trawl through the whole lot, I’ll be giving over the next week to a representative sampling of seven of them. Join me from tomorrow on The Agitation of the Libido.