Audrey Diwan's Emmanuelle (2024), starring Noémie Merlant as the titular protagonist, reimagines the iconic erotic franchise as a contemplative exploration of female desire, set against the backdrop of a luxurious Southeast Asian resort. Here, the gaze moves from male centrality and pleasure of the past Emmanuelle to self-reflective feminine gaze. Drawing on semiotic theory—particularly Roland Barthes' concepts of denotation (literal image) and connotation (cultural meaning)—this analysis focuses on the film's visual symbolism. Diwan employs a restrained, dreamlike aesthetic, cinematography by Laurent Tangy, to signify the tension between opulent excess and internal repression. Visual signs such as pristine architecture, symbolic objects, color palettes, and camera movements construct a narrative of elusive gratification, where pleasure is both promised and perpetually deferred.
The Luxury Hotel as a Signifier of Controlled Desire
The film's primary setting, the Rosefield hotel—a
sprawling, modernist resort evoking colonial-era grandeur in a Vietnamese
locale—functions as a polysemous sign. Denotatively, it represents high-end
hospitality, with Emmanuelle tasked with evaluating its facilities for a luxury
magazine. Connotatively, however, the hotel embodies the commodification of
intimacy: its pristine corridors and infinity pools suggest boundless
indulgence, yet their sterile symmetry signifies restraint and surveillance.
The architecture's clean lines and vast, empty lobbies mirror Emmanuelle's
psychological state—spacious yet confining, promising liberation but enforcing
a performative gaze.
This symbolism intensifies in the hotel's "secret wing," a hidden construction zone glimpsed through half-open doors. As a liminal space, it connotes forbidden access, paralleling Emmanuelle's repressed desires. The motif of enclosed luxury critiques postcolonial dynamics, with the resort's Western opulence overlaying Eastern exoticism, evoking Barthes' "mythologies" of tourism as a sanitized encounter with the "other." Here, visual expanses of marble and glass denote affluence but connote emotional isolation, underscoring the film's theme of desire as a transaction rather than a release.
Symbolic Objects: From Ice to Anticlimax
Objects in Emmanuelle serve as potent signifiers,
distilling abstract emotions into tangible forms. A recurring prop, the ice
cube—used in an intimate scene where Emmanuelle traces it across her
skin—replaces the original 1974 film's provocative "smoking vagina"
cigarette, shifting from fiery transgression to chilled detachment.
Denotatively a cooling agent, it connotes emotional frigidity, symbolizing a
"feminist" eroticism that feels sanitized and performative. The
melting ice evokes impermanence, mirroring the film's anti-climactic sex
scenes, where arousal builds but dissipates without fulfilment.
Another key symbol is the drooping exotic bouquet in the hotel lobby, its wilted orchids and frangipani signifying "petite mort"—the little death of orgasmic release—yet rendered impotent. This floral motif recurs in boudoir arrangements, their vibrant pinks and whites denoting tropical sensuality but connoting decay and unfulfilled longing. High-thread-count linens, obsessively pristine and white, further amplify this: they invite tactile pleasure but resist "dirtiness," symbolizing societal taboos around female messiness and abandon. These objects collectively signify a commodified body, where pleasure is aestheticized but never fully embodied.
Color Palette and Lighting: The Chill of Aspiration
Diwan's visual style leans on a desaturated palette
dominated by whites, silvers, and muted pastels, evoking a "chilly"
eroticism that aligns with the film's aloof tone. White linens and marble
floors denote purity and luxury, but connote emotional sterility—a visual
correlative to Emmanuelle's discerning restraint. Soft, diffused lighting from
floor-to-ceiling windows bathes scenes in a hazy glow, reminiscent of Wong
Kar-wai's neon-drenched longing, yet here it signifies diffusion rather than
intensity. Shadows play across skin during intimate moments, their elongated
forms connoting psychological fragmentation, as if desire fractures under
observation.
This chromatic restraint extends to skin tones: Merlant's pale complexion contrasts with the resort's "exotic" backdrop, signifying Western alienation in an Eastern idyll. The occasional flush of red—lipstick, a silk robe—acts as a punctuating signifier of arousal, but its rarity underscores elusiveness, turning color into a tease rather than a crescendo.
Camera Work and Motifs: Surveillance and Spectrality
Cinematographer Laurent Tangy's ultra-sleek framing employs
motifs of surveillance to interrogate voyeurism. Handheld shots from CCTV
angles in the hotel's observation room denote monitoring but connote
internalized judgment, with Emmanuelle's nude selfies extending this to
auto-surveillance—a digital mirror reflecting her fragmented self-image. These
static, wide-angle compositions signify control, transforming erotic encounters
into observed performances.
Dynamic camera movements provide counterpoint: an orbital shot encircling Emmanuelle during her long-awaited orgasm denotes culmination, yet its mechanical precision connotes detachment, as if pleasure is choreographed rather than spontaneous. The spectral figure of Kei (Monica Bellucci), an enigmatic regular, is captured in blurred, ghostly long shots, her presence signifying unattainable idealization. This motif of the "elusive other" recurs in reflections—mirrors, pool surfaces—where fragmented images denote multiplicity but connote the impossibility of wholeness in desire.
Conclusion: Symbolism as Subversion
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