A 'sexual melodrama' from French provocateur Gaspar Noé ('Irreversible', 'Enter the Void').
It promises all sorts of muck, and muck it delivers. ‘Love’ is a 3D sex film from Gaspar Noé, the French provocateur behind ‘Irreversible’ (violence, rape) and ‘Enter the Void’ (drugs, prostitution). It’s filthy and has many of the foibles of porn – bad dialogue, can-I-borrow-some-sugar plotting – but Noé holds back from showing hardcore penetration, although it’s hard to imagine his cast aren’t actually having full-on sex here. In the end, ‘Love’ is more silly than sordid, and even a little soppy in its late – too late – love-filled moments. Many teens will love it; most adults will roll their eyes.
It opens with Murphy (Karl Glusman, suicidally game), an American sort-of-film-student in Paris getting a handjob from his girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock, not the world’s greatest actress). But it then emerges that these two have split, and Murphy, fatter and with a moustache, is now unhappily living with ex neighbour Omi (Klara Kristin) and their toddler. The demise of Murphy and Electra’s relationship, via orgies, drugs, betrayal and lots and lots and lots of sex, is then revealed backwards as in Noé’s ‘Irreversible’. But time hops about much more here, so that what we get is more like a Paris-set, much raunchier and aggressive ‘Blue Valentine’ with murky visuals, frank sex and, of course, a centrepiece money shot that makes the very most of 3D (think about it).
You can’t totally dismiss Noé as an empty showman. He knows how to create and run with a base, nocturnal, queasily descending atmosphere like few filmmakers, and he’s alive to our self-destructive ability to screw up our own destinies. And there are some strong non-sex moments, too, especially two long, back-to-back scenes of Murphy and Electra walking and talking, once at the start of their romance and once towards the end.
But Noé fatally undermines any serious purpose with tongue-in-cheek scenes featuring himself (in a wig) as Electra’s older ex-boyfriend. Also, the film’s flagrantly autobiographical elements (Murphy, like Noé, says he want to make films full of sex, violence and spunk) are distracting and self-regarding. There’s a semi-decent, bold film buried somewhere here, but it’s nearly sunk by its need to shock and tease at almost every turn.
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“I want to film that which cinema has rarely allowed itself, either for commercial or legal reasons,” says Gaspar Noé, writer/director of cause celebre Cannes favourites Seul Contre Tous, Irréversible and Enter the Void. For his fourth feature, Noé sets out “to film the organic dimension of being in love”, free from “the ridiculous division that dictates no normal film can contain overly erotic scenes”. Thus we have a Last Tango in Paris-tinged tale of amour fou in which a disconsolate young American in Paris drifts from the responsibilities of fatherhood back into memories of lost love, Noé taking us on a lurid three-way tour of appendages and orifices, physical and psychological.
This of course is nothing new. Since the post-Deep Throat days of Nagisa Oshima’s Ai No Corrida(1976) and Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (1980), plenty of international film-makers (including Noé) have attempted to bring the hard-core imagery that has been with us since the birth of moving pictures (see 2002’s The Good Old Naughty Days) out of the “smoking clubs” and into mainstream cinema. In recent memory, films as diverse as Lars von Trier’s Idioterne (1998), Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000), Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004), John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour have all variously attempted to bridge the divide between art and pornography (or, as it is more quaintly known, “erotica”). Love may boast attention-grabbing scenes of what the BBFC calls “real oral sex, masturbation and ejaculation” – all in sexational 3D! – but it is merely the latest in a long line of films to challenge old taboos about explicitness.
If Love is not as groundbreaking as Noé suggests, then it is certainly personal, centring on an aspiring film-maker who complains about the lack of “sentimental sexuality” in cinema and boldly declares his ambition to make a film built on “blood, sperm and tears”. That this solipsistic young buck should share Noé’s mother’s family name – Murphy – and have the “Love Hotel” model from Enter the Void in his apartment suggests that he is a stand-in for the director, as does his declared devotion to 2001: A Space Odyssey, another trademark trope.
Yet to single out Murphy as the film-maker’s alter ego is to miss the point that everyone in Love can be read as fragmented versions of the director; from the young child named Gaspar whom Murphy cradles like Joe Dallesandro in Flesh (Warhol winks are everywhere, not least in a prominently displayed Frankenstein 3D poster) to the art gallery owner played by Noé himself in a fright wig, and of whom Murphy becomes insanely jealous. While the looping narrative and in-your-face visuals may focus on people having sex two, three, even four or five at a time, the film itself is peculiarly onanistic, reminding us that Noé (whose own penis pops up on screen) directed a segment of the hardcore compendium Destricted significantly entitled We Fuck Alone.
This dictum definitely applies to Murphy, a phallocentric narcissist who accurately describes himself as “a dick”. As for Love, its idea of engaging with the audience is to offer an eye-popping ejaculation that flies toward them in the film’s most notorious “money shot”. From the William Castle-style “30-second warning” gimmick of Seul contre tous to the head stovings of Irréversible, Noé has always been a playfully sensationalist provocateur and it’s clear that the stereoscopy of Love is employed more for scandalous than immersive ends. Launcher for iphone. While the 1969 3D softcore romp The Stewardesses promised that its lusty stars would “leap from the screen on to your lap”, Noé conjures POV shots of penises thrusting towards us through fleshy walls – a 21st-century twist on an old trick. Meanwhile, visual and/or aural nods to Salo, Assault on Precinct 13 and Cannibal Holocaust contextualise Noé’s scattershot artsploitation aims, the soundtrack lurching between Bach, Satie, and the wailing guitars of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain.
Amid such carnivalesque campery, it’s a shame that Love’s central trio are so humourlessly uninvolving, dragged down by dreary dialogue and cardboard acting. Compare them to the fully rounded characters of Shortbus whose polymorphous sex lives were explicitly depicted on screen but who also proved engaging, intriguing and – most importantly – lovable company. Not only was Shortbus more adventurous in its couplings (in Love, Murphy’s heterosexual desires rule the roost), it was also warmer, wittier and infinitely wiser on the subject of love. Noé’s film may not lack squelchy spectacle, but when it comes to anything deeper it is oddly anticlimactic.