Can that be considered a pun? If so that I would ask you to ... forgive me. As you may be able to forgive Felicity ... actually she doesn't need your forgiveness at all. She may need my puns ... nah she does not need those either. What she does need is ... well I think you know where this is going ... and who is coming? Yes another pun arrived.

One can say that this seems more than inspired by Emmanuelle. And while it is not direct copy it does have a lot of things you will recognize (like the chair and of course loads of nudity and sexual situations). I reckon the first "real" encounter, is not really pleasing for Felicity ... but she her curiosity has been awakened by that point. And there is no stopping now ... as a song would suggest.

The movie does have cliches in it and it is predictable. But it also is really well played. And while the exploitation tag may be deserved to a degree, there is more here than meets the eye (or any other body part for that matter, excuse the pun).

It does miss opportunities though. Like when she and a lover come out of the elevator and are asked "goind down", they could have said, "we just did" ... instead we get a corny "what a lovely couple" a few seconds later from the woman getting on the elevator (alone).

I watched the uncut version, apparently there was a version that was cut a bit. Funnily enough in its home country of Australia ... it had most of the issues there. Something that is being discussed in extreme length in deleted scenes from the great documentary "Not Quite Hollywood" - included on the disc version of this. Don't be easily offende ... and you'll enjoy what you are being served.

"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