“We’ve received not one single complaint, not one comment, nothing”, Margot (Naomi Watts) says. The hotel manager speaks to Emmanuelle (Noemie Merlant), a French quality control worker. The titular character in Audrey Diwan’s film is there to find Margot’s gross misconduct.

But so far, Emmanuelle can’t find anything wrong with how Margot runs the hotel. Not even a blackout and a storm can phase her customer service expertise. Besides, she herself is getting sidetracked thanks to guests, some more enigmatic than others. Some of these guests are filler, like Sir John (Jamie Campbell Bower), an actor evading work.

Emmanuelle‘s white whale, so to speak, is Kei (Will Sharpe), an engineer – the hotel’s staff, who keep a file on customers, know nothing about his life. A diligent worker, she enlists The Eye (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) to spy on him and he comes up with nothing. She takes matters into her own hands but she may end up discovering her desires.

The hotel in Hong Kong, in fairness to Emmanuelle, is a character here – the establishment is full of mirrors and fluorescent light, an affluent, liminal space. Liminal spaces don’t usually mean erotic, which factors into Emmanuelle’s limbo state of half horniness.

Supporting characters here also function here as Emmanuelle‘s silver linings, as outside of Kei, her other subject of desire is student Zelda (Chacha Huang). One of Emmanuelle’s inciting incidents is Zelda re-teaching the protagonist how to masturbate.

That masturbation scene in Emmanuelle makes me happy that someone is having fun. It shows Asian characters, usually belittled in Western cinema, as desirable and half horny. It’s too bad that the protagonist here, for the first half, seems miserable.

The characters in Emmanuelle have potential, and so do its spaces, as for the most part, the cinematography wavers from crispy to soft focus moments. The latter seems suited for erotic cinema but here it just seems like bad, sloppy work.

Erotic cinema’s heyday ended two generations ago and reimagining Emmanuelle has, again, some potential. A Gen X or millennial perspective of sex is necessary in contrast to boomers. But it seems like this movie sees sex as uninteresting or straight up hates it.

Emmanuelle begins with a mile high club scene and she hates doing the act – like why bother having sex if you’re not going to like doing it? It’s also obvious that she has no game, which, even the best of us have rusty days.

Audrey Diwan’s interpretation of Emmanuelle, then, is of a woman learning something about herself. With every person she sleeps with, she lets go of her frosty veneer. This though feels too stale for something that’s selling itself as risque.

Emmanuelle is available to stream on MUBI, which-