The first French “Emmanuelle” film was released in 1974, so it’s kind of amazing it took the French four long years to combine “Emmanuelle” with their other perennial favorite erotic heroine “Lolita” (based on novel by a Russian-American, Vladimir Nabokov, but first published in France). Actually, the first two Silvia Kristel “Emmanuelle” movies both had younger, “lolita-esque” characters in them, but here the character is important enough to actually be in the title.
Spanish actress Nieves Navarro, who had been in a couple of the “Black Emanuelle” movies with Laura Gemser, finally gets to play the title character here, but her “Emanuelle” is actually much closer to Sylvia Kristel’s original “Emmanuelle” than to Gemser’s “Black Emanuelle” (even if it’s also missing the second “m” in order to avoid lawsuits from the producers of the original series). Navarro’s “Emanuelle” is not a young housewife like Sylvia’s Kristal’s “Emmanuelle”, but rather an older businesswoman traveling around Asia with her helicopter-pilot husband. When their helicopter is forced to land for a while in a rural part of Thailand (or Malaysia?), “Emanuelle” befriends a young local girl called “Lolita” (Thiwa Yuporn). The young girl becomes obsessed with the older European woman. At first she puts her off, so the girl instead seduces one of her male lovers and her husband, but you just know this is all going to end with a steamy interracial, inter-generational lesbian sex scene!
Nieves Navarro was kind of an interesting actress in that she started in fairly legitimate Italian movies (gialli, spaghetti Westerns, etc.), but then became a (strictly softcore) porn star when she was middle aged. She was way too talented acting-wise for this genre, but she was still very good at it (and even at forty, she still had an incredible body). Thiwa Yuporn is an unknown Asia actress. She is diminutive, but VERY voluptuous (and obviously several years older than the character she plays here). There is also a third woman, Adrienne Delorme who plays the “Emanuelle’s” secretary (or something) who is somewhere between the ages of the two leads and, of course, also gets in on the erotic action.
The bootleg I saw of this was dubbed into German with no subtitles whatsoever. French is my third or fourth language, but I understand German only a little better than Mandarin Chinese, so I sometimes had no idea what was going on here. Despite it’s “political incorrectness” though this movie COULD get a legitimate English-language DVD release someday. It’s a lot less sleazy than some of the films Navarro made with Joe D’Amato that have been released of late. And even the “lolita” theme hasn’t hurt films like “Sister Emanuelle”, “Nea , a Young Emmanuelle”, and two different films called “Emanuelle’s Daughter” when it comes to international DVD releases. Don’t go out of your way to see this, but it’s not that bad.
