Which is a little unfair. The problem is that Franco in the 80s was not making the sorts of movies he’d made in the 70s. When Franco’s reputation started to revive, which happened when his movies started to become freely available on home video, that revival was based largely on the movies he made from around 1968 to the end of the 70s. Those movies became most people’s idea of what Franco’s film-making was all about. Movies like Necronomicon (Succubus), Paroxismus (Venus in Furs), Vampyros Lesbos, Female Vampire. His 1980s movies were made on even smaller budgets and the tone and the feel were slightly different. His 80s movies also tended to have even more sex. The assumption was that he’s fallen on hard times and was reduced to making ultra-cheap porno movies.
That’s not how Franco saw it. He loved making movies. For commercial reasons he found that in the 80s, if he wanted to get any money at all to make movies he had to include a lot of sex. At that time in Spain the censorship laws made it possible to make softcore erotic movies quite legally and they were very profitable. But Jess Franco, being Jess Franco, was going to throw his recurring thematic obsessions into the mix. He would make movies that seemed like straightforward softcore erotica but if you could get past all the sex and nudity you’d find him still worrying at those thematic obsessions and still finding ways to explore them.
And Franco was adaptable. He was happy to adapt his style. If he had to make a movie shot entirely in a hotel room he would do so, but he’d still make it a Jess Franco movie.
In the 80s he turned to his obsession with the Marquis de Sade again and again, in movies like The Sexual Story of O and Cries of Pleasure. He became increasingly obsessed with the alienation to which an obsession with pleasure can lead.
The Inconfessable Orgies of Emmanuelle was of course a title the distributors liked since any movie with the name Emmanuelle in the title was saleable. The movie does take the original Emmanuelle story as a kind of very vague jumping-off point. There is a woman in the movie and she is married to a diplomat, who happens to be a scion of the nobility. But in the original script she was called Ann Marie, not Emmanuelle.
The movie is narrated by the Marquesa de Altuna (Tony to his friends), a young nobleman who strongly disapproves of the sexual licentiousness he sees around him. We get the feeling that he’s a young man who thinks Spain should return to traditional values. That doesn’t stop him from operating a very profitable strip club.
Tony tells us that Maxim (Muriel Montossé) and her husband Andreas (Antonio Mayans) live in a house not far from his own home. Maxim and Andreas are enjoying a sort of second honeymoon, Andreas having forgiven Maxim for her numerous sexual indiscretions. They are madly in love, like a couple of teenagers.
Trouble appears on the horizon when Emmanuelle and Andreas, in company with their older lesbian friend Pia (Carmen Carrión), head off to Tony’s nightclub.
A stripper named Maria (Ida Balin) is performing a very hot strip-tease routine at Tony’s nightclub. She asks if any man in the audience would like to join her onstage. Maxim, who is very drunk, encourages Andreas to do but he refuses. So Maxim goes in his place. Maxim and the stripper have a good time together having oral sex onstage. Andreas, humiliated, spits the dummy and storms out.
Maybe it wasn’t a great idea for Maxim to then go home with the lesbian Pia but she does so anyway.
The theme of the movie is sexual freedom, how much sexual freedom is worth and whether the price is worth paying. Emmanuelle likes her sexual freedom. If she wants to make love, with whomever it is that she wants to make love with at the time, then she does so. Andreas struggles with this. That’s a problem for Emmanuelle because she really does love him. She doesn’t want to hurt him. But she wants her freedom. She has to choose between being a traditional faithful wife and being free. Andreas will have to decide if he can accept the idea of allowing her to be free or not.
Tony has his struggles as well but they’re played mostly for comedy. Franco is having fun with Tony’s absurd aristocratic pretensions and his hypocritical belief in traditional values. He believes in the traditional virtues but he’s not only living with a stripper he also has sex with Emmanuelle. He needs to accept that Maria may be a stripper and she may sleep around but he’s in love with her. He cannot accept being in love with such a wanton woman. He tells us that he’s fond of her, almost as fond as he is of his dog. He’s more fond of his dog because his dog is a pedigree dog whereas Maria is just (in his mind) a slut of the streets. But Maria is his best chance of happiness.
There’s nothing terribly profound here. This is Franco in a fairly lighthearted mood. Some of the characters are absurd but they’re not evil. They’re just struggling to figure out how to live. This movie is closer in tone to a sex comedy than to Franco’s Sadeian movies. He’s being playful. Emmanuelle and Andreas have sex in a wax museum, with John Wayne in wax effigy looking on disapprovingly. Franco has once again demonstrated his uncanny ability to find bizarre but fascinating modernist locations in which to shoot. There’s an absolutely amazing crazy house.
Franco wasn’t trying to make a cinematic masterpiece here but it is a reasonably interesting look at the issue of sexual freedom, and an amusing and acerbic glimpse into the mindset of the traditional values crowd.
The DVD includes as interview with Franco who is, as always, amusing and opinionated.
The Inconfessable Orgies of Emmanuelle is a deceptively simple rather witty look at sexual mores. Recommended, but as I’ve stated in the past I think it’s better to immerse yourself in 70s Franco before tackling his 80s output which has a slightly different feel.
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