Emanuelle Around the World seems to be a direct sequel to D'Amato and Gemser's most notorious collaboration, Emanuelle in America, with Emanuelle returning from the paradise island she escaped to at the end of that film and going on, believe it or not, an even more extraordinary adventure. The film begins with her making love on a Louis VVI bed, but this luxurious piece of furniture is in the back of a removals van in which Emanuelle is hitching a lift from the hunky driver. There's something curiously postmodern about the image of the antique being transported in a large van across contemporary America, and the scene sets in motion a series of dizzying and equally postmodern conundrums in the shape of the many adventures of our photo-journalist heroine. The trucker deposits Emanuelle at a luxury hotel in San Francisco, and in the lobby we meet a different black Emanuelle than we have seen before – she's impatient and rude to the concierge, and we wonder why our normally sanguine and affect-less heroine is on such a short fuse. She meets a fellow journalist, the feminist Cora Norman, and finds out that her friend is onto a story about female exploitation. A sexual encounter with a UN envoy persuades Emanuelle that her work ought to have a more political edge, and her experiences during her next job – exposing a phony love guru in India – push her into activism, but not before she has re-established herself as part of the consumer West by doing a pile of shopping.
The sequence with the guru is a remarkable set piece. Filmed in a Hindu temple, the avatar of love instructs his disciples in delayed orgasm building towards spiritual enlightenment, as D'Amato films various God's eye views of the revellers interrupted and upwards genuflections at the guru by more down-to-earth sceptical shots. Emanuelle, surprisingly for a woman who has always preached free love, sees how nonspiritual the guru's message really is – surely he'd spend more time helping the poor and less time improving the love-lives of vain wealthy Westerners if he really had a hot line to god? This disillusion with hedonism sends Emanuelle to Rome, where she teams up with Cora to expose a gang who have been kidnapping and trafficking women as sex slaves to the Middle East. Emanuelle goes undercover and we see two young men pick her and two other young women up, sell them to an older man at a restaurant who in turn sells them at a higher price to another man. Pasolini couldn't have given us a more striking illustration of human beings reduced to things, commodities. At the halfway house, as they wait to be sent outside of Europe, the women are raped by a hideous man whose face is terribly scarred, making him look like a demon. In the meantime, Cora is being raped by a gang of hoods as punishment for her investigations and a young man who is on Emanuelle's side finds where our heroine is being held and phones the police. This is striking because, for the first time in a D"Amato Black Emanuelle film we see a sequence which does not involve Emanuelle, as if to say that once activism and collective responsibility has come into play, the protagonist centred dramaturgy won't do.
Even more strikingly, the rescue of Emanuelle and the girls happens between scenes. We cut straight from the demon's pillage to Emanuelle emerging from the police station with her young ally. They then go to a boat his father owns and end up hiding and bonking in a closet, but there's something curiously inappropriate at this return to generic soft-core adventures after the sexual violence we've been witness to. The cramped condition of the lovemaking seems to mirror D'Amato's need to break free from the conventions of the genre.
We need to take the original Italian title – Emanuelle: Why Violence Against Women – at face value. D"Amato seems to be wilfully subverting the sexploitation genre as a way of asking a question about the treatment of women, a problem that he (like John Lennon in his famous song Woman is the N**ger of the World) sees as global. The film cuts from the US to India to Italy to China to the Middle East in the blink of an eye, and the point seems to be that the same patriarchal attitude treats women as chattels and sexual slaves no matter where on earth you go. Along the way, monsters and villainy (including enforced bestiality) more at home in the pages of de Sade than in harmless erotica are encountered.
Finally, we return to the US where a Senator sets up a beauty pageant queen to be raped by some down-and-outs for the entertainment of various rich slime-balls. Things get out of hand, the wealthy disappear and Emanuelle is degraded by being forced to fellate a bum. Women are mere objects to be used for the amusement of the rich or thrown as pornographic entertainment to the powerless. We as an audience are left with a very foul taste in our mouths. D"Amato has refused to give his audience what they expect from a soft-core frolic – is an artist painting a picture of exploitation rather than a mere exploitation filmmaker? Or an extraordinary and complex mixture of both