Notorious director whose erotic debut Emmanuelle became a runaway success

No-one was more surprised than Just Jaeckin when his film Emmanuelle (1974), starring the Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, became a runaway box-office success. His astonishment was perhaps understandable. Despite being a leading French magazine photographer, he had not previously made a film, while Kristel was also a screen novice.

‘‘To show you just how naive we were, we were happy to sell the film to Japan for just $40,000. After making it we were broke and that seemed a lot of money,’’ he later explained. ‘‘You know how much money Emmanuelle made in Japan? $14 million.’’

Based on

Emmanuelle

Arsan’s erotic novel, Emmanuelle is set in

Thailand and tells of a bored wife who follows her diplomat husband to Asia where she becomes involved in a series of steamy trysts. The film, which became a classic of the softporn genre, is credited with bringing sexploitation out of the closet and into the mainstream, thanks to its air of sophistication and high production values: not only was it French, but it also featured locations that would not have looked out of place in a James Bond movie.

Kristel, who was 22 at the time of filming, recalled how she only appeared by accident, having turned up at the studio to audition for an advertisement.

There she met Jaeckin. ‘‘He asked me to take my dress off. Luckily it was an easy dress to take off. It had spaghetti straps which I slipped over my shoulders and it just fell off. I carried on talking and smoking in the nude. I was not inhibited at all. I’d done nude modelling and he thought I was very graceful.’’ He knew immediately that she was right for the role. ‘‘I was thunderstruck when I saw her,’’ he recalled.

Filming took place in Thailand on a tiny budget. ‘‘Our crew consisted of only about 10 or 15 people,’’ Jaeckin said. ‘‘We were all very young and inexperienced.’’

Emmanuelle, which was shown in mainstream cinemas drawing regular filmgoers, became an international hit, playing for more than a decade in one cinema on the Champs Elysees in Paris. As the censors in the UK wrangled over what should or should not be cut, British cinemas placed adverts in newspapers promising: ‘‘Emmanuelle is coming.’’

Its success prompted dozens of sequels, spinoffs and imitations, and while Jaeckin did make some money he was, like Kristel, for ever more typecast. He also found that the concept was easily copied. ‘‘Producers took one look at that film and decided the formula was simple. All you needed was a beautiful woman against a beautiful backdrop. You certainly didn’t need Jaeckin. So I got no offers.’’ He refused to watch the sequels, insisting that they were merely erotic while his aim had been to create a fantasme (fantasy).

He did, however, make a few more X-rated films including Histoire d’o (The Story of O, 1975) starring Corinne Clery as a young fashion photographer who is deposited by her boyfriend at a chateau where she is enslaved into a sado-masochistic cult. It was banned in Britain until 2000, though those who visited France to catch a viewing were left disappointed. ‘‘Painfully tedious and tediously painful,’’ noted one critic.

Madame Claude (1977) was based on the true story of a Parisian brothel madam who schools her ‘‘swans’’ in culture. Thereafter Jaecklin ‘‘decided I wanted to break away and do something different’’.

He worked on The Last Romantic Lover (1978), ‘‘which was not sexy at all . . . it was a love story about an American girl arriving in Paris’’, and Girls (1980), about four teenage girls enjoying life after high school.

Yet he was never really at home with fully clothed characters, tending to barge through the more thoughtful elements of the story to reach the naked bits. Nowhere was this truer than in his steamy if faithful adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1981), in which he was reunited with Kristel, who again played an amoral innocent who is nagged into promiscuity by the people around her.

‘‘Literature loses out to pretty titillation,’’ was The Times’ verdict of a film that achieved neither the box office success nor the notoriety of Emmanuelle.

Just Jaeckin was born in Vichy, central France, in 1940 to a Dutch father and a British mother who took him to England, where she had relatives in Rugby. After the war the family returned to France and he studied art and photography. During military service in Algeria he continued to pursue his photography and on demobilisation worked as a fashion photographer and art director at Paris Match.

‘‘Being young in the Sixties wasn’t always easy, but it was an era that allowed endless possibilities,’’ he said. ‘‘Everything was new, nothing compartmentalised. You could do any number of jobs, you just had to have ideas and energy.’’

There would be one more sexploitation film of note: Gwendoline (1984), also known as The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-yak, based on the French bondagethemed comics of John Willie. Thereafter Jaeckin turned to sculpture and in 1995 married Anne, a former professional dancerturned-sculptor 21 years his junior. They set up a studio in the pretty town of Saint-briacsur-mer in Brittany and in 2001 opened a gallery in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. Anne survives him with a daughter, Julia, who is a professional photographer.

Whatever misgivings the improbably named Just Jaeckin had about being pigeonholed as a pornographer, the money he made from films bought him the freedom he desired. ‘‘I decide anything I want, such as going off for a long skiing holiday to indulge my love of sport or working nonstop for six months when inspiration has me in its grip,’’ he told Cote magazine. ‘‘But don’t be mistaken, I’m the laziest person on earth. I’m driven by my urges.’’ – The Times