EMMANUELLE TRIES to make the long climb from pornography to pornographic art and gets tangled up in some embarrassing place in between. At first this big budget, soft-core, high-class porn flick seems to be just a confused attempt to rival Last Tango in Paris as a sophisticated X. rated movie--that the ads promise "will change the meaning of X." Not content with just visual eroticism, director Just Jaeckin tries to convince us that he's making a serious philosophical statement on human sensuality. He fails not so much because he lack the originality and the wit of a director like Bertolucci but because his effort is transparently insincere. His plot is so poorly planned and the lofty lines of his script are so dull and pointless that it just looks like he had nothing to say and knew it.

The film does achieve one of its goals. Its exquisite photography makes it truly erotic, at least for a while. Shot in Bangkok, the film is stunningly exotic and a constant visual delight, and Jaeckin placed the most beautiful bodies he could find against this rich background. He knows how to make women and scenery look breathtaking. Yet he relies so heavily on static concepts of photography that the effects wears off rather quickly. His characters seem posed and reposed for visual effect, instead of directed for dramatic effect, so that the action bogs down after the first half hour. Aimless directing, a weak plot, liteless characterization and a preposterous script do nothing to keep things moving. The effect is something like watching an animated issue of Vogue magazine.

THE AD CAMPAIGN boasts about the plot, but the story is a vague, improbable fantasy about an elite society of aristocratic decadent French diplomats marooned in Thailand with no one to talk to but each other's wives. These men and women live in splendid Thai places, sunbathe and give parties, and murmur complacently that "our only enemy is boredom." Their unwritten rule is to fight boredom." Their unwritten rule is to fight boredom by making love. Throughout the movie the characters keep asking each other if they are bored, and the response is predictable.

Emmanuelle, newly married to one of the rising junior execs of the Diplomatic Service, is the wide-eyed innocent, the Candy of the French screen, who with surprising diligence and seriousness tries to fit into her husband's social milieu: as she says, to become a "true wife" to him. Whatever plot there is stems from her alternating distaste and awe towards this glittering, exotic, useless way of life. Yet the conflict between her resistance on the one hand and the constant sexual wooing of her male and female friends on the other--to persuade her that once she tries it she'll like it--is unconvincing. Emmanuelle, in her unfailingly dumb, wondering way, never leaves any doubt that in the end she'll give in, she'll assimilate in the most predictable way possible, not with a bang but with a whimper. Sylvia Kristel as Emmanuelle is tall and leggy but her only notion of acting seems to be to widen her eyes. As in the most hard-core pornography, a threadbare plot exists only to bring on more skin and to make the idea of watching people make love for two hours seem continually purposeful and slightly less absurd.

THE MOVIE OPENS with a shot of Emmanuelle staring out of the window; it is raining outside and her robe is sheer and diaphanous. The phone rings, Emmanuelle glides over, answers it, and as she sits down her robe falls open from the waist. And the ads promised. "X was never like this."

Jaeckin knows that pornography is supposed to be made from the common fantasies of the audience, so he tries to throw in a little something for everyone. Yet he's also so worried about making some kind of directorial comment that he isn't content with just creating fantasy--he fusses with it so much that the end product is often confusing and unintentionally funny. Marie-Ange, a beautiful child of about sixteen, is sitting on the porch talking with Emmanuelle--they're both swinging lazily in hanging wicker seats--about the evils of sexual repression. As a demonstration of how to be otherwise. Marie-Ange casually picks up a magazine, leafs through it, and to Emmanuelle's consternation, just as casually begins to masturbate. When she finishes, a minute later, the magazine falls open to a picture of Paul Newman.

Right after this there's a flashback to Emmanuelle's plane flight over from Paris. Everyone is sleeping in the half-lit cabin. Except Emmanuelle and craggy faced man sitting across the aisle. She gets up and gets a blanket. He looks over a few times She looks back. He can't believe it. His face is such a mask of dumb stupor that when he finally heaves out of his seat to cross the aisle it's too much, the audience began giggling at this point and didn't stop. The couple's writhing and gasping is intercut with shots of another man with a craggy face sitting behind them, who keeps raising his eyebrows. After a minute he too heaves out of his seat and wooden faced, strides manfully down the aisle picks up Emmanuelle and carries her into the bathroom to more incredulous laughter from the audience. What follows is a direct steal from the first scene of Last Tango, its perhaps reverent plagiarism ruined as an erotic image by the fact that Emmanuelle is sitting on the sink in what must be pure pain.

THE KIND OF movie Jaeckin envisioned demands convincing acting and a kind of consistency of intent missing here. If the actors seem aimless and uncertain of what and how much to express, perhaps it's because Jaeckin himself can't decide whether to be serious or satiric. There's a scene in which a man furiously takes a woman on a table. Next to her is a magazine lying open to a cosmetics ad which screams in bold face, "HELP IS ON THE WAY." We can only wonder what the hell Jaeckin is talking about.

The most plausible answer is that he never bothered to figure it out himself. Throughout most of the film the message, if any, appears so garbled as to be unfathomable. At times he toys with the idea of condemning these bored aristocrats for their callous inhumanity to each other and their parasitic hold on a decadent way of life. At other times he drifts closer to the original message of the novel, that through the tutelage of this society Emmanuelle is receiving something that everyone is entitled to--a true "sensual awakening."

Towards the end of the film he fixates on the latter idea. Emmanuelle is persuaded to have an affair, or rather a pedagogical experience, with Mario--the aging Don Juan, the sixty-year-old perfect master of the group. Mario's idea of a sexual education is to expose Emmanuelle to a series of humiliations to which she docilely submits, while he watches impassively. In between episodes he pontificates to her on the metaphysical nature of love and sensuality. It's soft-core scriptwriting like this that makes the hard stuff look at least honest. After he has taken Emmanuelle to an opium den and watched her being raped by a native Thai, he intones. "Real love is the erection, not the orgasm"--something Emmanuelle must be painfully aware of by now.

THIS CONCLUDING supposition--that Emmanuelle learns to enjoy sexual degradation at the hands of men and, through it, finds her womanhood--is an extreme but logical extension of the sexism inherent in the film all along. Emmanuelle's ostensible reason for going through all this is to become a better wife to her husband. Throughout the film it is men, and not women, who lead her to what the film finally defines as "womanhood" and "fulfillment." Even Jaeckin's chronicle of fantasies is obviously intended for men-his approach to soft-core photography is to show all of the women fully naked, but the men never naked below the waist. His camera rarely focuses on the men's physical or emotional responses to sex, but the women's are intimately scrutinized. The camera itself is a man.

A terrific publicity campaign has turned Emmanuelle into a box office success rivalling that of Last Tango, by promising racy respectability ("X you can take your wife to") and a certain intellectual stimulation ("The most sensual part of your body is your mind). The poster earnestly assuages embarrassment and guilt, promising that "after the film is over you don't find yourself making a hasty departure while scrupulously avoiding eye contact." The great success of these ploys, along with the material opulence and glibly amoral tone of the film, is a clue to what the movie was meant to accomplish. Jaeckin's premise and perhaps the only guiding principle of the film, is that there is a large, well-heeled audience out there that loves pornography, is too fastidious to seek out the crass version in the Combat Zone, and will pay through the teeth to have it served up with a veneer of class. For this reason Emmanuelle isn't just a skin flick, but has been made into a film with towering pretensions to philosophical and artistic merit. These conceits make the film ridiculous where it might otherwise have been a little boring, but nice to look at.