This is a rather bizarre movie in that it was co-directed by the real-life Emanuelle Arsan, who wrote the influential "autobiographical" novel "Emmanuelle" on which Just Jaeckin's even more influential French film "Emmanuelle" was based. The other director, however, is the primo Italian trashmeister Ovidio Assontis, who was responsible for "The Exorcist" rip-off "Beyond the Door" and the "Jaws" rip-off "Tentacles". Here he's basically ripping off Jaeckin's "Emmanuelle" in collaboration with the original female author. The strange result of all this is a film that is as allegedly arty and laughably pretentious as the "official" French "Emmanuelle" series, but every bit as low-rent and derivative as the many Italian rip-offs of that same series (although, unfortunately, it's not nearly as entertainingly sleazy as the Joe D'Amato "Black Emanuelle" films).
The movie concerns a mini-skirt clad, underwear-averse young woman, "Laure" (Annie Belle), who is traipsing about the Filipines on some half-ass anthropological expedition to find a lost native tribe. (If this were a d'Amato film the tribe would turn out to be cannibals and eat everybody, but don't get your hopes up here). She is encouraged by her photographer boyfriend (Al Cliver)to have sex with anybody and everybody (older men, women, local natives, and even at point a transvestite helicopter pilot!) usually while he films the encounter.
Belle was a very pretty French girl with a fantastic body, who always looked incredibly sexy despite the bleach-blonde, crew-cut Annie Lennox hair-do she always wore. She was starring in, and sometimes even writing, movies like this from the time she was barely 18 years old (She also appeared in Jean Rollin's "Lips of Blood", Masimo Dallamano's "End of Innocence", Ruggiero Deodato's "House by by the Edge of the Park", and with Laura "Black Emanuelle" Gemser in "Velluto Nero"). Emanuelle Arsan herself also appears in the movie and she too has a plethora of nude sex scenes. (Strangely, she actually looks a lot more like the "Black Emanuelle" Laura Gemser than the official "Emmanuelle" Sylvia Kristel). The real problem though, as others have said, is the lame-brain plot of this movie which is pretty boring and really adds nothing at all to the eroticism.
I guess I'd recommend this to my fellow 1970's "Emmanuelle" completists. But while it's not terrible, it's not that great either.
