Emily
Emily
| 01 November 1976 (USA)
Emily Trailers

Evocative of the Roaring Twenties, "Emily" (Aka "The Awakening of Emily") is an erotic coming-of-age film featuring meticulous period detail and music. The sharp class distinctions of British society are blurred by the universal nature of sexual desire.

Reviews
Leofwine_draca

EMILY is something of an overrated film for me. As a film, it has its fans but I personally fail to see what all of the fuss is about. It's a simple vehicle for erotic starlet Koo Stark, she of the royal scandal, and contains a very slim kind of story which plays out very slowly with hardly anything in the way of action. The film is set in 1928 which is perhaps the most interesting thing about it, giving the director a chance to show off some grand old fashions, country houses, and class distinctions, but otherwise this slight tale could be set in any era.Stark plays a young woman desperate to lose her virginity before she marries. That's all there is to the tale. A sub-plot involves a maid and her lover, while a queue of middle-aged gentlemen show up to attempt to get into Stark's affections. Stark herself is regularly naked but doesn't show much in the way of acting talent and the characterisation is next to nil in this picture. I found it a slog to sit through, if I'm honest.

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Goingbegging

Koo Stark may have given the tabloid headline-writers a heck of a name to play with, but the reality was anything but sizzling, and it is hard to make out what Prince Andrew saw in her, at least outwardly. The face carries no distinction whatever - just ordinary hausfrau features that never display any depth of expression. The body, although well-photographed in the shower scene, is no more shapely than most. The voice is not unappealing, but it lacks any character or charm.Whether she can be classified as an actress at all is unclear from this video. The story is set in 1928, apparently for no other reason than to provide a class-based narrative, with forbidden liaisons across the boundaries. Therefore many of the lines are meant to echo what we take for Twenties talk - stilted, trivial and going nowhere.Emily (Stark) is a school-leaver, ripe and ready for deflowering. She starts to discover herself via the lesbian route, and holds back on the big deed, until she learns that her mother (played by Sarah Brackett, spectacular if nothing else) can support her upper-class lifestyle only through taking rich lovers. For some reason, Emily feels she must 'become a woman' before she can face her again. That is good news for one lucky motorist who has taken her on a drive into deep country, though the supposedly-climactic outdoor seduction scene must be the worst ever filmed; their two bodies look like a tangle of cold tripe.Meanwhile the housemaid is also clinging to her virginity, until she unexpectedly glimpses Madam up to mischief, and then reacts the same way, to the delighted surprise of her long-suffering soldier boyfriend.The opening titles come up against a long background-shot of a train belching smoke, as a hardly-original code for a vintage story, though it may also have been trying to reference a vastly better coming-of-age film 'Greengage Summer' with Susannah York and Kenneth More, who said it was the happiest film he ever made.A Rod McKuen song 'Riding through the autumn' adds interest, but does not move the story forward. The dinner-party scene is interspersed with soft-porn shots representing the thoughts behind the small talk, one of the few good touches. Otherwise, this film utterly fails the test of any porn-feature - to create suspense and longing. And last heard-from, Koo Stark is playing Miss Havisham for real, still believing on one level that history never happened, and that she has gone on to become a world-acclaimed princess. Maybe she's an actress after all.

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amjad qureshi

I saw the movie when i was a teen ager and found it interesting only because Koo Stark, who at that time was in close contention with the Royal family, was exposed in it. I recently watched it again and was more disappointed. The movie is horribly directed and acted all through.It contains unbelievable scene sequence and the story is so unrealistic that it starts to bore after fifteen minutes. I wonder whether there is any connection of the plot with the writing of the legend Marquis de Sade. Everyone in the movie seem to be obsessed with one and only one feeling, and that is sex. The major sex scene at the end of the movie is also unerotic and boring. Don't watch this movie even if u r a fan of Koo Stark.

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filmboy-1

It has been many years since I've seen this film, but what I remember is that is deals with Emily's sexual awakening to womanhood. I would recommend seeing the uncensored version since the video I saw trimmed off most of the steamier scenes. The shower scene between Emily (Koo Stark) and Augustine (Ina Skriver) is beautiful and sensual and makes up for the film's shortcomings.

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