Sylvia Kristel’s
death last week at the relatively young age of 60 as a result of
complications from a long battle with lung cancer brought back
memories to many of us of her mid-Seventies heyday as
the softcore sex queen. An extremely attractive,
but refreshingly not “bodacious,” presence, she was genuinely
sexy, and although she lamented in later years that her acting career
had never gone quite where she wanted it to, her triumph was always
in exuding sensuality without seeming either phony or forced.
Dutch by nationality
but always mistaken for French because of her best-known film work,
Kristel had been a secretary and a beauty contest winner before she
took the plunge and starred in Just Jaeckin’s landmark softcore
feature Emmanuelle in 1974.
The posters quietly
stated, “X was never like this,” and it was indeed true: the film
ranked alongside Radley Metzger’s features as being one of the
classiest bits of film erotica ever. It thus garnered several
distinctions. Among them was the fact that it played in Paris not in
a porn house, but in a theater on the Champs-Elysees, and in America
it was shown not in grindhouses but in arthouses thanks to its being
distributed (with subtitles yet!) by Columbia Pictures.
Shortly after her
“Emmanuelle” fame, Kristel was cast by two auteurs (Chabrol and
Robbe-Grillet, more on this below), but the majority of the films she
worked in in both French and English were either “Euro chic”
(read: safe for couples) softcore — Lady Chatterly’s
Lover 1981), Mata Hari (1985) — or
lame, leering American sex comedies, the biggest hit being Private
Lessons (1981). One of her weirder assignments was a
supporting role in the really horrible Get Smart
feature The Nude Bomb (1980).
She later discussed in
her autobiography Undressing Emmanuelle the highs
and lows that movie stardom conferred upon her in the late Seventies
and early Eighties. She dated gents like Vadim, Depardieu, and Beatty
as she made the move from France to L.A. She also cultivated a
cocaine habit, had trouble with alcohol, and entered various
relationships looking for a “father figure.” The most salient quote
she provided for this period comes from her autobio: “sooner or
later the debt must be paid... women are charged a great deal for
having been beautiful, unfairly different, attractive, for provoking
unsatisfied desire.”
She remained a very
good-looking woman up until her death, but those of us who continued
to watch her movies throught the Eighties and Nineites were well
aware that she was that was making horrible choices in both her life
and her career — especially when you see her in absolute L.A.-made
straight-to-video crap like Beauty School (1993). The film was clearly made to be
funny but, as the trailer indicates, it’s just fuckin’ awful.
Her rather
wild lifestyle did begin to make her look slightly older onscreen —
especially when she suddenly appeared with curly hair, dyed red, in
no-budget potboilers. I did actually pay to see the first few
Emmanuelle sequels in theaters and, as is true of
every series, they got worse as they went along.
Emmanuelle:
The Joys of a Woman (a much better title than the original
“Emmanuelle 2”) led to Goodbye, Emmanuelle, which was
just absolutely awful. The only thing I remembered about the film was its very catchy theme song.
Years later I discovered that the song had been written by Serge
Gainsbourg and performed by Serge and Jane Birkin. This is definitely the
best thing about the third installment:
Kristel still looked
very good in 1984, but the time had come, apparently, to find a
newer Emmanuelle. Instead of simply replacing her outright, it seemed
that the producers wanted to publicly humiliate her by having her
appear in the dreadful Emmanuelle 4 as a woman
named Sylvia who flees her boyfriend by going to Brazil and getting
“extensive plastic surgery” (so sez the Wiki for the film; I seem
to remember her entering some kind of chamber or something).
When she emerges with
her new (younger, natch) face, she is “Emmanuelle,” played by the
actress Mia Nyrgren. I was embarrassed for Kristel when I saw the
picture (which was shot to be shown in 3D and had “explicit”
scenes included in its European and VHS versions).
Little did I know that
she reprised her most famous role again, several times, in a
made-for-cable series of films made in 1993-94, in which she was
actually billed as “Old Emmanuelle” — the sex scenes were
undertaken by an actress playing the younger Emmanuelle (and one of
the costars was the one-time-only Bond, George Lazenby). I should
note that when she did Emmanuelle 4 she was 32,
and when she was “Old Emmanuelle” she was exactly 41.
Therefore, it makes
perfect sense that Sylvia went back to the Netherlands and continued
to work as an actress in less racy material. She was an avid painter
and directed a short cartoon in 2004 about the ways in which her
mentor, artist Roland Topor, changed her life (you can see two
minutes of the cartoon on her IMDB page).
Some of the obits for
Sylvia referred to her as having been “the world's most famous porn
star” at one time. She was never a porn star, she was an actress
who was as sexy and elegant in clothes as she was out of them.
*****
I found many wonderful
video tributes to Sylvia online, including this one (scored to Serge and Jane). The gentleman who runs the Sylvia Kristel fans blogspot has let us hear the lady speak for
herself, with uploads of interview footage from the extras on the
Emmanuelle DVDs:
The first
Emmanuelle was the sexiest film she was ever in,
but it was one of two films she was in that did phenomenally over
here. The other one was the coyly sleazy Private
Lessons. Here is the famous scene where she undresses to
excite a young boy, carefully edited of course to remove any nudity
(YouTube is an American-owned company, and as such can't deal with
the sight of the human body).
It's a really goofy
scene, with dippy music, but Sylvia does look wonderful, and I have
the uncanny feeling that no film like this could be made in the
American mainstream anymore, since we've gotten to be an even more
Puritanical society in this, the age of the Internet:
The best musical number
I found by her on the Net was this nice bossa nova tune, “Changes,”
performed by Sylvia with the Eddy De Clercq Quartet:
I decided to close out
this tribute with three clips that I couldn't find anywhere online,
so I uploaded them myself. The first is her entire appearance from
the Alain Robbe-Grillet film Le Jeu Avec Le Feu
(aka “Playing with Fire,” 1975).(Thanks much to Paul G.)
Robbe-Grillet's films
are odd affairs that use the cyclical, open-ended construction of his
nouveau roman novels, but they also have several
sequences in which women are seen tied up. In this instance Sylvia is
the victim and, although she looks lovely, she is shamelessly thrown
in and then tossed out of the picture. NOTE: The English subtitles for this film make no sense, but that shouldn't affect your viewing experience.
The second film
represents her most notable starring turn for an “auteur,” Claude
Chabrol's Alice ou la derniere fugue (1977). The
film is intriguing and downright bizarre at times, but is mostly
notable for being the only adaptation of Lewis Carroll in which Alice
is alone for long periods of time and only encounters a small handful
of not-so-colorful characters! (But yes, she is naked here, so the
clip briefly becomes NFSW).
And finally, my
favorite moment from the “lower end” of Sylvia's career, her
attack on Linda Blair at the end of the women-in-prison pic Red
Heat (1985). The film is ridiculous, but wonderfully so at
times. The scene that ends this montage is one of those times.
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