JR: Yes, she was often lazily compared to Marilyn Monroe, whom she loved and shared some in common with personally, but they were opposites on screen. When an author has completed a massive coffee table book that includes the topic at hand, one supposes that that author has the right to do so. At the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Siritzky said he was looking for a new Emmanuelle, with production on the first film scheduled to begin in September. After the success of Emmanuelle, she often played roles that capitalized on that sexually provocative image, starring in an adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1981), and a nudity-filled biographical film of the World War I spy in Mata Hari (1985). While I think it’s important to mourn what we have lost, I think it’s also important to turn the focus to what really matters: the artist, and their art.

Unlike Goodbye Emmanuelle, Sylvia channeled her increasingly fractured and gloomy personal life into her work on Mysteries. Director Paul de Lussanet manages the task well enough, his result being at times cumbersome but never lifeless.Emmanuelle 6 (1988) also had two hardcore scenes (one short without ejaculation, but with fellatio and penetration, between a man and a woman whom Emmanuelle watches in a horse box, and the second longer, with fellatio, penetration and ejaculation, starring the same couple entering the place where Emmanuelle is being held prisoner at the end of the movie), directed by erotic horror specialist Jean Rollin. When released in 1974, the erotic French film Emmanuellebecame a worldwide sensation that topped box offices and garnered controversy. The explicit content in the films varied from softcore to full hardcore, though no penetration or oral sex made it to public versions.

In any case, it can’t be denied that the breakout commonality of Emmanuelleand Juliais indeed Sylvia Kristel, without whom we would be far less likely to be considering the latter today. It is a generous (and beautifully designed) book, filled with reproduced posters, lobby cards, publicity photos, showing this young untrained (and yet instinctive and extremely well-read) actress thrust into the international European spotlight for her featured roles in the emerging Dutch cinema of the 1970s. She left her husband for British actor Ian McShane, whom she had met on the set of the film The Fifth Musketeer (1979). Richey does counterbalance this inherent favoritism by including a plethora of quotations from contemporary film critics from all over the globe, both positive and negative reception.In fact he gave me the only useful piece of direction for the love scenes: "Try not too look too much like a dead fish. Instead, in her relatively small number of scenes, Sylvia comes across as gloriously free, seemingly without the burden of institutionalized sexism…Sylvia overcomes the materials misogynistic tendencies and projects youthful independence that is still startling all these decades later. The shimmering ghost of Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel forever hovers over the international sexploitation sub-genre. PLEASE CHECK THE PICTURE FOR CONDITIONMost are in excellent condition but may have normal wear such as edge wear or a slight hole.

Sylvia had a poetic coolness about her so even when she was playing “sexy” it had a more intellectual drive than Monroe’s flirtatious on-screen persona. The title role of the sexually adventurous housewife in Emmanuelle (1974) became a reference for every part she played subsequently. It’s also worth noting that nearly everyone of Sylvia’s editors throughout the seventies were women, so all of these cultural revolutions of the period powered by women were bubbling under in these seemingly male-made films. It’s a celebration of an extremely smart and talented artist and a period in art and popular culture that was unlike any other. Her character Julia, however brief her cumulative presence, isa vital and unforgettable part of director Sigi Rothemund’s eighty-eight minute sexually charged coming-of-age vacation film.

In a tale brimming with confrontational imagery and out-there filmmaking, narrative cohesion was never high on Robbe-Grillet’s priority list for Playing with Fire. is Dutch as well and he was able to offer up some vital suggestions and tips for the chapters in the book that cover her Dutch films.