Above is a Japanese poster and a pamphlet front for the French sexploitation flick Laure, aka Forever Emmanuelle, which premiered in Japan today in 1976 after opening in Italy nine months earlier. We watched it, and first of all the movie looks great. It’s crisp, bright, and colorful—three things you really want when Annie Belle is the star. We gather that the palpably high budget was due to an infusion of big studio money from Twentieth Century Fox via Cinecittà Studios, as they tried to cash in on the 1970s sexploitation phenomenon. None of this means the movie is good.
Emmanuelle flicks are chaste and atmospheric, more romance than raunch, and Laure is no exception. Belle plays a highly sexed minister’s daughter running wild in the Philippines, from Manila to the jungly outer reaches. There’s a plot having to do with searching for the isolated Mara tribe, but the movie is more a series of swinger lifestyle lectures and sexualized vignettes, such as when Belle drops her skirt so she can walk around in public wearing nothing but a shirt that flashes her muff, and when she gets laid in a bamboo hut that’s being dragged through the woods by a dozen Filipino workers.
She’s wanted by everyone whose path she crosses, but it’s Al Cliver who piques her interest, thanks to his unwillingness to attempt caging her or cooling her hot blood. At one point he announces, “Jealousy is an obscenity.” It takes quite a man to watch the woman he loves have explosive orgasms with every stranger who happens along.
Of special note is a co-starring turn from Thai/French personality Emmanuelle Arsan, who in 1959 anonymously published the book Emmanuelle, source of the film franchise. Or at least she was thought for years to have been responsible for the book. Her husband Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane is now considered the author. Arsan was also credited with directing Laure, or at least co-directing it, but that was Rollet-Andriane again, whose name isn’t on the film for reasons too involved to go into here.
Well, it’s definitely Arsan playing the role of Myrte, adding to the film’s visual allure by looking great naked at age forty-four. She can’t act, but she’s good at giving wise looks and secretive smiles. She’s easy to buy as the source—or at least inspiration—for Emmanuelle, because she’s a very sexy woman. Despite all the film’s beauty, we aren’t going so far as to recommend it generally, but for lovers of globetrotting softcore or fans of Annie Belle it’s mandatory.
