Audrey Diwan – Emmanuelle: “I am not a director of provocation”
While reading Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel, the director of L’Evénement wondered how she could talk about eroticism today.
A few days before the theatrical release of its modern adaptation ofEmmanuelle, Audrey Diwanthe director of The Event, tells us how she took hold of the heroine created by Emmanuelle Arsan to bring her into our times and offer a unique way of filming eroticism.
Here is an extract from his long interview which is at the heart of our special issue n°27, special Emmanuelle.
FIRST: How did the desire to tackle this issue come about? Emmanuelle after the success of The Event ? Did you feel the famous anxiety of the next film?
AUDREY DIWAN: Above all, I wanted to avoid any situation of comfort. And I have the impression that I choose my subjects at the point where excitement meets fear. As for Emmanuelleit was my producers who suggested it to me.
What was your first reaction to this proposal?
I had never seen Just Jaeckin’s film in its entirety. So I dove into Emmanuelle Arsan’s book in a rather recreational way without being obsessed with the idea of finding a way to adapt it. And then two-thirds of the way through the novel, I discovered these hundred pages filled with questions about eroticism. And that’s what constituted a kind of trigger.
In what way?
These pages made me wonder what eroticism is today. It’s as if I had gotten my hands on a material that intrigued me and ended up becoming the desire of the film. How do you work on this eroticism? Can you create an erotic story today? With The EventI had spent three years working on the idea of pain and I must say that I was quite happy to talk about pleasure.
Even if your heroine, she, is precisely unable to feel pleasure and suffers from it…
I can’t help but put a little pain everywhere! And there’s no pleasure without pain, right? (Laughs.) The book, written in the first person, is obviously tinged with a lot of ideas from the time that seem violent and out of touch today. But quickly enough, to tell the initiatory journey of this young woman,
I wanted to wipe the slate clean. To take up the figure of Emmanuelle and ask the spectators to forget her. Which is, I grant you, quite perilous. But I wanted to use this name, this body as a vessel and change the proposed journey. To free myself completely from what had been done. With a central question that would run through the entire story: how to tell and transmit pleasure, to create a place of tension between what we show and what we hide in a society like ours, marked by the influx of pornographic images? The eroticism of transgression that Just Jaeckin’s film summoned seems to me to be exhausted today. An erotic film can no longer focus on sexual scenes. Unlike, for example, a sports film, punctuated by imposed meetings. Eroticism must infuse through the scenes, pass through the word and not only through the lever of the bodies.
Without seeking to play on a certain provocation, on prohibitions such as the soft SM of Fifty Shades of Greyone of the recent successes of the genre?
I am not a director of provocation. In my films, I never seek to provoke in order to provoke a reaction. There is in this gesture a form of instrumentalization of the spectator that I do not like. I seek precisely the opposite: to impose nothing on him.
To read more, go to newsstands.
I subscribe to Première I buy this issue
Here is the synopsis and trailer ofEmmanuelleto be seen in preview this Tuesday via the premiere festival :
Emmanuelle is in search of a lost pleasure. She flies alone to Hong Kong, for a business trip. In this sensual world city, she multiplies experiences and meets Kei, a man who never ceases to elude her.
With this film, Audrey Diwan gives us a free adaptation of Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel and takes a feminine look at the intimate quest of the woman whose first name still today evokes one of the most controversial characters in cinema.
Emmanuelle will be released in theaters on Wednesday, September 25.
