Emmanuelle...

The problem with what I still call the Web Wide World is that it springs news upon you when you are least expecting it, sometimes news that you don’t want to hear.

Today, whilst looking for something completely different, my eyes were caught by one of those news items that they disperse within the text. Generally I don’t notice these things but my eye was drawn to two words ‘Sylvia Kristel’ and from there to the third word of what turned out to be a very sort sentence - ‘Dies’.

Sylvia Kristel Dies.

For a moment the clock on the wall stopped ticking and I was seventeen again, a memory of rattan chairs and puffy nipples flooding through my consciousness as, for a brief instant, I remembered the excitement of being young with a world of possibility in front of me. Reading on I was surprised to see that Sylvia was only a handful of years older than me. I’d always thought of her as the older woman, worldly wise, an ingénue – perhaps because she was Dutch or maybe it was the hair - but as it turned out she was just twenty-two to my seventeen when she starred in Emmanuelle. No difference at all really.

Back then Emmanuelle had seemed so racy with its mile-high, lesbian, oral, group sex, rape scenes – all heavily censored and simulated of course in blurred soft-focus long shot. It was erotica really, hardly soft porn, these days even the soaps are nearly as graphic. But it caused a sensation back then; the film was even banned in France for a while before becoming the country's highest-grossing film of all time

I have three distinct memories of Emmanuelle.

The first was a trailer I saw in the interval of some other film excursion, The Three Musketeers or maybe Carrie, before I even saw Emmanuelle. The words ‘Coming Soon’ in big letters appeared on the screen, to be followed by ‘Emmanuelle’ in that distinctly cursive typestyle... the cinema erupted in howls of laughter.

The second happened on the day I plucked up the courage to go see the film. I’d skived off school with my girlfriend and we’d caught the bus into Oxford. We were patiently queuing in our furs and tatters outside the Odeon, all ready for the two o’clock performance, when who should come out of the cinema after watching the eleven o’clock? No other than Chunky Gould, my English master, raincoat discreetly folded over one arm. He looked at me, and I looked at him as he mumbled: “I think you’ll like the first film better than the second.” The first film was Confessions of a Window Cleaner, and I didn’t – but I was never reported for skiving.

My final memory is of being on another bus one morning when the inspector got on. This was some time after I’d seen the film and become a fan of Sylvia. He asked to see my pass, which I gave him not realising it had expired the previous day. After ticking me off and taking the 1/-3d fare (which I had to borrow) he removed the pass from its plastic see-through wallet only to find a naked Emmanuelle I’d cut from a newspaper hiding behind where the pass had been. He went scarlet, passed back my pass and scuttled away down the stairs.

Hard to believe that the beautiful young woman in that old cutting is dead; sixty is really no age at all. Apparently Emmanuelle dogged Sylvia all her life and she appeared in several of the increasingly tawdry, pornographic sequels - not ‘Emmanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ though. Years after she told a reporter: "I was on a train and I couldn't jump off. What is it they say? Be careful what you wish for."

Be careful what you wish for, advice I’ve somehow never been able to follow.

Twice divorced and with her money gone - lost to alcohol, cigarettes and cocaine addiction - Sylvia spent her final years in a small apartment above an Amsterdam cafe. She tried her beautiful hand at painting, a second career as an artist; she could paint a bit and lived on the modest proceeds, supplemented by money from the occasional television interview. I like her paintings very much.

I can’t explain how or why I feel the way I do about Sylvia Kristel and Emmanuelle, perhaps it’s a right of passage thing. It’s all wrapped up in a time of my life - well, in a time of my life when I was having the time of my life. If only I’d know it at the time. Anyway, another small piece of my youth gone; goodnight Sylvia, sleep well.