Western Writers in Bangkok: Hugo Claus & Sylvia Kristel

Hugo Claus in Flemish Cultural Center on Hugo Claus evening November 15, 1986 (Photo: Wikipedia)

In 2009, an English-language manuscript for an Emmanuelle film that had never been shot suddenly surfaced in a well-known Antwerp antiquarian bookshop. You know, the sensational soft porn series produced in the XNUMXs that made Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel - briefly - world famous.

The author of this script was none other than Hugo Claus, the self-proclaimed Pope of the Dietsche Schrijvelaars. That Hugo Claus had a hand in writing a script for Emmanuelle was not surprising in itself. As is abundantly clear from his immense oeuvre, the writer was not averse to the erotic genre. Moreover, in the early 24s, Claus and Kristel had a relationship that left them with not only a flat in Paris, but also a son, Arthur. He had met the 1973-year-younger actress and fashion model in the spring of XNUMX on the film set of Not for the cat. A film by Fons Rademakers, for which Claus had written the screenplay.

In the late autumn of 1973, Kristel and Claus moved to Bangkok to shoot the first Emmanuelle film. Under the professional direction of director Just Jaeckin, pseudonym of a French artist/writer with a Dutch father and British mother, the film was made in a few weeks. Packaged as art-house erotica, the film, in which Kristel played the wife of a member of the French embassy staff in Bangkok who explores her sexual boundaries, became a huge success worldwide, partly due to an initial screening ban in France.

She would come in later Het Parool explain that they had seen the film as a means of getting to know Thailand and Bangkok. “Hugo said: 'Just do it, a film like that will never make it to the cinema, your mother won't get to see it…' It was certainly not the only time the writer was wrong: The hot expat environment in Bangkok intrigued millions of cinephiles and other film enthusiasts. It is estimated that 350 million people have seen the film. In a way, the famous movie poster with a topless Kristel on a reed peacock throne became one of the icons of sexual liberation in the 59s. Kristel would play in four more Emmanuelle films, but her final filmography counted XNUMX feature films.

Sylvia Kristel at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival (Photo: Wikipedia)

Sylvia Kristel would also reach for the pen. She wrote her autobiographynaked' which was published in 2007 by De Bezige Bij, the Dutch publishing house where Claus was also a regular for decades. She has also illustrated books by Claus, Roland Topor and Willem Frederik Hermans.

Claus did not break literary pots in Bangkok. He was, as he once confided to me in an unguarded moment, engaged in '…drink and fuck, whether or not in that order…' As far as I know there is not a single page in his entire oeuvre that is devoted to his stay in Krung Thep or Thailand.