Emmanuelle (Sylvia Kristel) has taken a ship back to her husband in Hong Kong, but things have not gone as planned, for she had booked a first class cabin, or at least she thought she had, yet on boarding the vessel she finds that there is a problem and she is not going to get what she wanted. She has actually been relegated to the women's room of the ship, where all the females sleep communally, and one of the other women there is in the same position, and not happy either. Emmanuelle goes to make a call to her husband Jean (Umberto Orsini) but is propositioned by the radio operator - she didn't want that, so will nothing brighten up the voyage?
Well, it's the sequel to Emmanuelle, one of the biggest hits of the nineteen-seventies, so you can be sure she'll think of something. That something happens when she awakes in those quarters in the middle of a very hot night and finds the blonde woman next to her can't sleep either, so after sharing her first sexual encounter with our girl (about how she was sexually assaulted by her schoolgirl classmates but had an orgasm anyway - tasteful) she and Emmanuelle make better use of their time as they have a steamy encounter amid the sleeping ladies. All this was presumably to illustrate how the titular character was no longer about to lie back and have things done to her.
Nope, this time she was the proactive one, instigating the sexual exploration as her husband has taught her, and seeing as how she doesn't need to work for a living she has plenty of time to seek the perfectly fulfilling sex act with men and women alike. Once back in Hong Kong, she meets her husband's new propeller-wielding pal Christopher (Frédéric Lagache) while he's in the bath in their lavish home (these films liked to rub the viewer's nose in the abundance of wealth these folks revelled in) and is soon going shopping with him. This trip naturally ends up with him watching as she is sent into ecstasy by acupuncture needles in her nipples in an extremely forward example of getting familiar with Chris.
Nobody gets too embarrassed here, not even the ballet student Emmanuelle sets her sights on claiming for seduction by she and Jean, one Anna-Maria (Catherine Rivet), who is blonde rather than brunette like our heroine, for variety. To whip her into shape, she takes Anna-Maria and her hubby for a full body massage, which appears to entail lying on a mat while an Asian woman rubs her soapy self all over you - and, again, nobody thinks this is a bit off, they simply go with it in an instance of how this series presented the exoticism of non-European climes as the ultimate in potential eroticism. Notable was that one of the massagers was played by Laura Gemser, who would soon be taking up the mantle of Black Emanuelle in her own series of movies, which if anything would wind up far sleazier than the franchise that inspired them.
As Emmanuelle was more of a go-getter this time around, it was clear that all the screenwriters had done was more or less take the original script and make Emmanuelle into the experienced seducer and put other characters in her place, for a variation. It was not really a case of her being the corrupted turned corruptor, as she was portrayed as having her life thoroughly enhanced by her experiences and there was something almost zen about the way she found spiritual enlightenment through the pleasures of the flesh, appropriate to the East Asian location of which we were given ample travelogue footage in between the sex scenes. The plot was insultingly basic, but who watched these for the plot? They were pure sexual fantasy fuel and any glancing acknowledgement of reality was by no means by design, more accidental than anything else, with events leading up to what could best be described as a predictable climax where (spoiler!) Anna-Maria shags both the happy couple at once. Richard Curtis was a fan, or so he says. Music by Francis Lai.
