The master of one “Emmanuelle” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 165 (7366) of 09/08/2022

Juste Jaquin, the photographer, artist and director who defined the “big pop style” of the 1970s with the unforgettable film Emmanuelle (1974), died at his home in Brittany at the age of 83.

The shooting of “Emmanuelle”, a manifesto of glamorous and what, God forgive me, innocent eroticism, was comparable in intensity to the monstrous epic of Coppola’s “Apocalypse”. The Dutch intellectual Sylvia Christel was so embarrassed by explicit scenes that she filled up with champagne before each of them. Almost half of the budget of half a million dollars was gobbled up by a bill for a broken limousine. Jaquin ended up in a Thai prison for filming on the territory of a Buddhist monastery. The great Alain Cuny – he played the heroine’s erotic guru – demanded that his name be removed from the credits. And super-conservative Minister of Culture Maurice Druon cut out everything that gave it meaning from the film.

And then all of a sudden, as if by magic, turned upside down. The suddenly deceased President Georges Pompidou was replaced by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a declarative enemy of censorship and part-time lover of Christel.

“Emmanuelle” was released almost uncut on June 26, 1974 and did not leave the Parisian screens for ten years: a poster with a legendary photo of a naked heroine in a rattan chair hovered over the Champs Elysees.

Tourists from the US and the UK poured into Paris just to watch the film. In France, it gathered 9 million viewers, in the world – another 50 million: no one counted the viewers of domestic video salons. Cuny was indignant at the absence of his name on the posters. In general, the bet made by the producer Yves-Rousseau Rouart on the director-debutant Jaquin paid off with a vengeance.

By the early 1970s, Jaquin was famous as, the French would say, a “charm photographer”, a regular contributor to Elle, Marie Claire, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and other Mademoiselle Age Tendre. He went through, like many Frenchmen of his generation, a strong – much stronger – professional training as an army photographer on the fronts of the Algerian war. After demobilization, he continued to film the war as a freelancer. But in the world of glamor photography, which experienced its golden age in the 1960s, he remained “one of”. Not Helmut Newton, in a word.

His finest hour was a nude photograph of Jane Fonda, a savage woman hiding her nakedness with matted hair. But who then did not shoot naked Fonda. He shot an excellent double portrait of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, but the flamboyant couple were so photogenic in themselves that it would be hard to shoot them badly.

In general, he took off in his life everyone who was supposed to: from Barbara, Sylvie Vartan and Ursula Andress to Monica Bellucci and Natalie Portman. But the choice of Ruar fell on him.

Obviously, he caught in the works of Jaquin that plastic, moderately conformist, moderately bold gift, which could only bring to the wide screen hitherto forbidden, exotic, secular, nerve-wracking, but never crossing the line of pornography sexuality. And yet the eroticism of “Emmanuelle” turned out to be inaccessible to replication: we are not talking about sequels, but about Jaquin’s further film career.

His filmography includes seven and a half (including one short film) films. From the surprisingly vegetarian, compared to the fierce prose of Pauline Reage, the film adaptation of the sadomasochistic “The Story of O” (1975) and the erotic-political thriller “Madame Claude” (1977) to the film adaptation of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (1981) and the comic strip “Gwendoline” (1984 ). It’s not that they were worse than Emmanuelle: it’s just that the time has passed when Paris looked at the naked body on the screen with that childishly extended look that in 1974.

Wise Jaquin left directing, returned to photography and to his “first love” – ​​painting and sculpture.

For the past twenty years he has run a small gallery on rue Geneguet in Paris, where he has exhibited with his sculptor wife Anna and daughter Julie, who inherited her father’s profession as a photographer.

Mikhail Trofimenkov