Emmanuelle—the Joys of a Woman
(Directed by Francis Giacobetti; starring Sylvia Kristel; 1976)
Let me, Emmanuelle, teach you the secret joys of love. I will show you how to live for pleasure . . . let me take you to a new world.—Advertisement
And on and on. Emmanuelle was a pristine innocent at the beginning of her first film, but the kid was a quick study, and now here she is in the sequel as a sort of combination sex therapist and hidden garden of desires. She’s married, but that hasn’t slowed her down; if her husband explains once, he explains a dozen times that Emmanuelle’s life is her own to lead, and that he doesn’t possess her (more than about twice a day).
The two of them live in Hong Kong now, in a vast mansion filled with potted palms and slowly revolving fans and white wicker furniture and servants who assist them in and out of states of undress. Life is pleasant. Emmanuelle’s husband has no apparent line of work, although he maintains a little office at home—primarily, I suspect, because one scene requires a desk for Emmanuelle to crawl under. Such are the demands of sexual liberation.
One day a young aviator comes to call. He was just flying through, you see, on his way to Australia, when he developed a little engine trouble. He sleeps with his propellor. During waking hours, he polishes the propellor while sitting on the lawn. We wait for two hours to discover what additional purposes the propellor will be put to, but we never learn; some secrets are not to be revealed. The aviator gets the guest room.
Then there’s the lovely Anna-Marie, whose father throws sophisticated dinner parties after which exotic dancers perform. Anna-Marie doesn’t get along with dad, and so she moves in with the Emmanuelles, too. Poor thing, it’s so hot out that she can hardly move, and so Emmanuelle and her husband take her to a bathhouse, where they receive what is advertised in the free weekly papers as a full body massage.
Emmanuelle’s search for the most distant shores of love is a demanding one, and during the course of Joys of a Woman she also (a) surprises a tattooed polo player in a dressing room and is most cruelly treated by him, (b) has her clothing interfered with by Anna-Marie’s dancing teacher, (c) is seduced in the women’s dormitory of a steamer bound for Hong Kong from Thailand, and (d) achieves orgasm by acupuncture, while the aviator looks on, propellorless for once. We wait in vain for her to discover the missionary position, but such relief is denied her.
The attractive elements of the original Emmanuelle are present here, too: the pretty Sylvia Kristel, the languorous color photography, the exotic locations, the outrageous fantasies. But somehow the characters seem to have lost track of their sanity; they wander from one encounter to another like wife-swappers at a postlobotomy ball. They have glazed looks in their eyes and think with their mouths open. And they lose track of time, of things. The aviator never does go on to Australia, and dad doesn’t come looking for Anna-Marie, and Emmanuelle and her husband never do decide whether he should shave off his mustache, and dinner’s not served . . . yawn . . . and. . . .
End of Days
(Directed by Peter Hyams; starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Pollack; 1999)
There are forces here you couldn’t possibly comprehend. —Dialogue
You can say that again. End of Days opens with a priest gazing out his window at the Vatican City and seeing a comet arching above the moon like an eyebrow. He races to an old wooden box, snatches up a silver canister, pulls out an ancient scroll, unrolls it and sees—yes! A drawing of a comet arching above the moon like an eyebrow! For verily this is the dreaded celestial display known as the “Eye of God.”
The priest bursts into an inner chamber of the Vatican, where the pope sits surrounded by advisers. “The child will be born today!” he gasps. Then we cut to “New York City, 1979” and a live childbirth scene, including of course the obligatory dialogue, “Push!” A baby girl is born, and a nurse takes the infant in its swaddling clothes and races to a basement room of the hospital, where the child is anointed with the blood of a freshly killed rattlesnake before being returned to the arms of its mother.
Already I am asking myself, where is William Donohue when we need him? Why does his Catholic League attack a sweet comedy like Dogma but give a pass to End of Days, in which we learn that once every one thousand years a woman is born who, if she is impregnated twenty years later by the Prince of Darkness during the hour from eleven to twelve P.M. on the last day of the millennium, will give birth to the anti-Christ, who will bring about, yes, the end of days? While meanwhile an internal Vatican battle rages between those who want to murder the woman, and the pope, who says we must put our faith in God?
The murder of the woman would of course be a sin, but perhaps justifiable under the circumstances, especially since the humble instrument chosen by God to save the universe is an alcoholic bodyguard named Jericho Cane, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jericho and his partner (Kevin Pollack) find themselves investigating a puzzling series of events, including a man with his tongue cut out who nevertheless screams a warning and is later nailed to the ceiling of his hospital room.
Movies like this are particularly vulnerable to logic, and End of Days even has a little fun trying to sort out the reasoning behind the satanic timetable. When Jericho has the Millennium Eve scheduling explained to him, including the requirement that the Prince of Darkness do his dirty deed precisely between eleven P.M. and midnight, he asks the very question I was asking myself: “Eastern Standard Time?”
The answer, Jericho is told, is that the exact timing was meticulously worked out centuries ago by the Gregorian monks, and indeed their work on this project included, as a bonus spin-off, the invention of the Gregorian Calendar. Let’s see. Rome is six hours ahead of New York. In other words, those clever monks said, “The baby will be conceived between five and six a.m. on January 1, Rome time, but that will be between eleven and twelve a.m. in a city that does not yet exist, on a continent we have no knowledge of, assuming the world is round and there are different times in different places as it revolves around the sun, which of course it would be a heresy to suggest.” With headaches like this, no wonder they invented Gregorian Chant to take the load off.
End of Days involves a head-on collision between the ludicrous and the absurd, in which a supernatural being with the outward appearance of Gabriel Byrne pursues a twenty-year-old woman named Christine (Robin Tunney) around Manhattan, while Jericho tries to protect her. This being a theological struggle Schwarzenegger style, the battle to save Christine involves a scene where a man dangles from a helicopter while chasing another man across a rooftop, and a scene in which a character clings by his fingertips to a high window ledge, and a scene in which a runaway subway train explodes, and a scene in which fireballs consume square blocks of Manhattan, and a scene in which someone is stabbed with a crucifix, and . . .