Emilienne

This movie was rushed into production to cash in on the sudden and unexpected success of Just Jaeckin's EMMANUELLE, which explains the directorial presence of a hack like Guy Casaril whose biggest hit had been the slightly naughty farce LES NOVICES, pitting then reigning sex goddess Brigitte Bardot against experienced comedienne Annie Girardot.

Production values are fair (decent cinematography, fluent editing but awfully dated soundtrack full of elevator muzak) but the travelogue footage of the original it's trying to emulate is sadly missing. And yet this is still my personal favorite among that revered soft porn blockbuster's myriad cinematic siblings (and I duly apologize to lovely Laura Gemser for that statement, true though it is !), largely because of beautiful blonde anti-bimbo Betty Mars in the title role. A talented torch singer who sadly took her own life in the late 80s, she's best remembered for supplying her vocal chords to the title character otherwise played by Brigitte Ariel (whatever happened to her ?) in Casaril's biopic PIAF. Her only movie appearance 'in the flesh' (and, boy, that's no euphemism !) was here as the bisexual spouse of arts professor Claude fooling around with conniving student Nicole, 'Nouky' to her friends. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Mars attacks (sorry, couldn't resist that one) the part with such intensity, she completely overshadows the rest of the not terribly convincing cast. Her female co-star Guerin in particular is a source of irritation, her whole repertoire consisting of mugging and pouting.

Thanks to our Betty's haunted performance, sex scenes such as her discovery of the joys of Sapphic romance in the arms of a small legion of blonde and buxom Widows of the Sea (don't ask how this came about, just sit back and enjoy) end up far more stimulating than they might have been. Another aspect that puts this movie apart from most other titillation romps is its dim view of marital bliss with some of the harrowing scenes in its middle section (when the protagonists attempt a 3-way marriage with disastrous results) playing like Strindberg Lite.

Explore your inner lesbian with groovy Gallic filmmaker Guy Casaril's saucily sensationalist, libido galvanizing, girl-on-grappling, blissfully bodacious boudoir bonanza 'Emilienne'!!! These fondue hawt, funky-fingered French fillies deliriously discover that they share a mutually insatiable appetite for orgasmically organic, creamy delicious quim cuisine! Watching these gleefully glamorous gals make with the scurrilous sapphic traffic excitingly proves itself to be a wantonly wild, visually voluptuous ride!!!!!

The exquisitely erotic affair of dazzlingly beauteous Nathalie Guérin and her slinky-voiced songbird Paramore Betty Mars becomes a pleasingly pulchritudinous peep-show for all those sensually orientated to seek out the more satisfyingly salacious cinematic titbits! Unrepentantly sin-seeking, fleshly-orientated fanatics of the no less orgiastic ouvre of flavoursome celluloid sensationalists Max Pécas, Jess Franco, and Just Jaeckin might avidly appreciate spending an agreeably lurid interlude with Guy Casaril's softly focussed, nipple-tweakingly naughty, sweetly sultry, dreamily decadent 1970s sapphic sensation 'Emilienne'.

'Un film sans sexe, c'est comme une saucisse sans sang!' (A film without sex is like a sausage without blood!') - Raffael Gauloises III. Author of 'Gallic glamour : erotic cinema sans frontières'

In the wake of the world and French success of "Emmanuelle" with the stunning Silvia Kristel as the erotic heroine, producers went searching for other erotic material to be made into an erotic movie in the hope to get a piece of cake that the world was discovering. The novel by Claude des Olbes was removed from its dust and rewritten into this movie. Everything what the movie "Emmanuelle" makes as an erotic experience lacks this movie. Starting at the top with its heroine down to the script, production, setting, story, actors...Both movies are as opposite as black and white. As colorful and mysterious Sylvia Kristel is as Emmanuelle so flat and stuffed is Betty Mars as Emilienne. She is so boring and uninteresting as a character that you wonder why her husband did not go sooner in a relationship with a younger woman. Seeing Kristel as Emmanuelle gives you the notion that she is capable of leading a life that she lives with her husband and lovers (male and female) in an exotic locale like Bangkok, Bali, Hong Kong...Emilienne as a movie gives you such a claustrophobic bourgeois feeling in Paris/France and their houses that the only thing comes to your mind is to get out of the room screaming longing for fresh air and sunshine. Emilienne is a movie only for those who would like to torture their brain or would like to have a good laugh.

Exploitation for sure but as this is French it has pretensions of being and certainly looks like, art house. Elegant soft core tale of ménage-a-trios, develops well enough and the younger woman certainly looks young if not particularly pretty, although it must be admitted there is nothing wrong with her body, something about her mouth, I think. Anyway the story develops, the trio live together, then it all goes wrong and we have a tragic conclusion - with half the running time left! Things get weird for a while and we go inside an amazing brothel offering young girls to aged lesbians. We are well used to older men sizing up the young girls before they take them off but seen this way round is a little unnerving and when one selects a girl for her dog….. We also get to glimpse some Brittany female coven/sect before gradually some semblance of normality returns. Sexy sex and fun frolics are back on the agenda but then the ménage collapses again (inevitably) after the wife had relinquished the principal role to the other. Takes itself just a bit too seriously but given that this is the middle seventies it's pretty much par for the course and not enough to stop this being an enjoyable and despite itself an interesting movie.