"Felicity" is one of the innumerable imitations from the seventies and eighties of Just Jaeckin's notorious "Emmanuelle". Like that film it is a piece of softcore erotica chronicling the amorous adventures, both heterosexual and lesbian, of a young white woman in a Far Eastern city, in this case Hong Kong rather than Bangkok. Whereas Emmanuelle had been a married woman, the wife of a French diplomat, Felicity is supposedly a teenage schoolgirl, even though Glory Annen, the actress who played her, would have been 26 in 1978. (Sylvia Kristel was only 22 when she first played Emmanuelle).
I don't need to say much about the plot. We first meet Felicity as a girl in a convent boarding school, where she has a lesbian crush on one of her classmates. She then moves to Hong Kong, where she loses her heterosexual virginity in a joyless coupling with an older man, watches a friend and her husband making love, has another lesbian tryst with a beautiful Chinese girl called Me-Ling and eventually falls for a handsome young man named Miles.
The film shares some features with "Emmanuelle" such as the soft-focus effects used for the love scenes. Annen is even seen sitting on a chair very similar to one used by Kristel. It lacks, however, the portentous (and pretentious) philosophising of the earlier film; the closest it comes to philosophy is the heroine's conclusion, after falling in love with Miles, that sex should be reserved for someone you really love, a conclusion which would doubtless have seemed hopelessly moralistic to Emmanuelle.
Kristel was never the world's greatest actress, but compared to Glory Annen she looks like Katharine Hepburn. On the basis of this film, Annen's acting skills appear to have been close to zero, beyond the most elementary skill of being able to remember her lines and recite them in a flat, toneless voice. There is no attempt to convey any meaning or emotion, and it is all too clear that she was cast on the basis of her cutesy, girl-next-door prettiness and of her willingness to take her clothes off, not on the basis of any talent.
In the early and mid-seventies softcore films like this were controversial, but were regarded by their defenders- and they had plenty- as something fresh and liberating after decades of prudery in the cinema. By the end of the decade, however, the novelty was already starting to wear off, and something like "Felicity" was no more than a third-rate knock-off of a second-rate film like "Emmanuelle". 2/10
I don't need to say much about the plot. We first meet Felicity as a girl in a convent boarding school, where she has a lesbian crush on one of her classmates. She then moves to Hong Kong, where she loses her heterosexual virginity in a joyless coupling with an older man, watches a friend and her husband making love, has another lesbian tryst with a beautiful Chinese girl called Me-Ling and eventually falls for a handsome young man named Miles.
The film shares some features with "Emmanuelle" such as the soft-focus effects used for the love scenes. Annen is even seen sitting on a chair very similar to one used by Kristel. It lacks, however, the portentous (and pretentious) philosophising of the earlier film; the closest it comes to philosophy is the heroine's conclusion, after falling in love with Miles, that sex should be reserved for someone you really love, a conclusion which would doubtless have seemed hopelessly moralistic to Emmanuelle.
Kristel was never the world's greatest actress, but compared to Glory Annen she looks like Katharine Hepburn. On the basis of this film, Annen's acting skills appear to have been close to zero, beyond the most elementary skill of being able to remember her lines and recite them in a flat, toneless voice. There is no attempt to convey any meaning or emotion, and it is all too clear that she was cast on the basis of her cutesy, girl-next-door prettiness and of her willingness to take her clothes off, not on the basis of any talent.
In the early and mid-seventies softcore films like this were controversial, but were regarded by their defenders- and they had plenty- as something fresh and liberating after decades of prudery in the cinema. By the end of the decade, however, the novelty was already starting to wear off, and something like "Felicity" was no more than a third-rate knock-off of a second-rate film like "Emmanuelle". 2/10