EMANUELLE AND FRANCOISE: Softcore With D'Amato Darkness
In the '70s and '80s, Joe D'Amato was a prolific font ofItalian exploitation cinema, making horror, sexploitation, post-apocalypticaction flicks and even full-fledged pornography (he'd finish out his careerspecializing in this final option). If you grew up watching Skinemax, you mostclosely associated his name with the BlackEmanuelle series, a barrage of globe-trotting sexploitation films starringLaura Gemser. Many a young mind was blown by these films, which would offsetthe expected sex and skin with excursions into snuff films and cannibal tribes.
Shortly before he got going on the Black Emanuelle films, D'Amato made a film called Emanuelle And Francoise. It had nothingto do with his later successes, as Gemser is nowhere in sight, but it does theset the tone for his sexploitation style by mixing the carnal and the macabrein a dark, occasionally disturbing manner.
The premise of EmanuelleAnd Francoise was lifted from TheWild Pussycat, a Turkish exploitation film that Bruno Mattei had a hand inreshaping for Italian release. Mattei and D'Amato wrote the script for theiruncredited remake, which begins with cute model Francoise (Patrizia Gori)throwing herself in front of a train after being cheated on and kicked out byher sleazeball boyfriend Carlo (regular D'Amato collaborator George Eastman).
Francoise's sister, chic columnist Emanuelle (Rose MarieLindt), identifies the body and the authorities give her an unsent letter fromFrancoise that reveals how she suffered endless abuse at the hands of sadistic,gambling-addicted Carlo. Emanuelle plotsa unique revenge by seducing Carlo, drugging him and putting him in chains in ahidden room in her apartment. Said hidden room has a two-way mirror andEmanuelle torments Carlo by trotting out an array of lovers male andfemale. As he descends into insanity,the stage is set for finale with ironic outcomes for both people.
Like a lot of D'Amato's best work, Emanuelle And Francoise is an intriguing combination of artfultechnique and grimly perverse content. D'Amato was his own cameraman here, adouble-duty he often pulled on his own productions, and he's got an eye for theglossy, soft-focus erotica that was in fashion in the mid-'70s: the openingtitles montage with Francoise going through a number of alluring poses for acameraman is a perfect example.
However, D'Amato can also pull off a surreal horror setpiecewhere a drugged, mentally fragmenting Carlo looks on behind the mirror asEmanuelle enjoys a dinner with a group of friends. In short order, he begins to hallucinate thatthey are eating raw meat and severed body parts before the women rip theirclothes off and rush in to torment him with their bodies. The comingling of sexand death is as unnerving as it is surreal. D'Amato also seems to tease his audience over their voyeurism by cuttingaway from the sex to show bestial, lust-crazed Carlo helplessly leering with anever-more-manic stare. On a similarlyironic note, Emanuelle discovers that trying on Carlo's lust and sadism don'tbring her the vengeful satisfaction she craved.
In short, Emanuelle And Francoise stands out from the mid-'70s sexploitation pack because of D'Amato's singular touch. He takes joy in giving the audience what it wants in a way they didn't expect to get it, couching his cheap thrills in a world of predators and victims where greed and lust corrode the souls of the people chasing them. It's a daring tack for a softcore film director to take but D'Amato built an entire leg of his career on this kind of film. This was just the shot across the bow for the willful weirdness he'd explore in the worlds of sexploitation and horror through the rest of the decade.