Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Does sex have a sell-by date? The question may come to mind watching Emmanuelle, the new spin on a randy old chestnut. To audiences mature enough to remember the 1970s franchise just this side of soft-core porn, the project will feel like a big-screen prawn cocktail: a cultural relic reimagined.Everyone else may simply be puzzled. The movie, which stars Noémie Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire), often plays like a documentary about bad acting, and arrives critically savaged after festival appearances. But the stilted mood also feels knowing. Is the film any cop by conventional measures? It is not. Nor is it sexy. Is it intriguing, at least sometimes? I’d say so.We open at cruising altitude, with in-flight congress in the first class bathroom and a mood of narcotic daze that infuses the whole movie. Touchdown is Hong Kong, where our heroine stays at a splendid hotel while working as a quality control inspector, recording to the second how long her mineral water takes to arrive poolside. In a professional limbo between staff member, guest and spy, Emmanuelle enjoys the luxury, but at a certain emotional distance. So too the metronomic nookie.The movie really is a weird one, often feeling as if a modern script about the ecology of the super-rich had been randomly branded as a piece of 50-year-old intellectual property. No less odd is the involvement of director Audrey Diwan, whose last film, clear-eyed abortion drama Happening, is hardly the obvious preface. Yet amid the glassy opulence, you sense self-satire. In the hotel sauna, a producer of commercials complains to Merlant about the female director he is working with, currently getting ideas above her station while shooting a spot for yoghurt. And the air of alienation and moneyed ennui can, just now and then, pack a strange and heady jolt. Among the critical barbs on the festival circuit, it was said the movie felt like an advert for a product no one wants. You wonder if that may be the point. ★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from January 17
