Gaspar Noé has proven himself an imaginative auteur, highly capable of and fiercely loyal to surreal, experimental cinema. He shocked with the unforgettable Irreversible and warped minds with the visually satisfying Enter the Void – undoubtedly his two most famous works – but now he seeks to add a more tender, sentimental touch with Love. Not to be confused for a 3D porno, the film is an exploration of love’s disjointed trajectory and the psychological dispair that can follow, allowing Noé to deliver something a bit more positive than the aforementioned.
Surprisingly, this is one of Noé’s tamest outings, and even though the sex scenes are quite explicit they are nowhere near as excessive as one would expect. Instead, Noé delivers an innocuous exploration of love, sex, loss, and grief, all told out of chronological order.
The film really has only three actors with two or three peripheral characters (including an art gallery owner played by Noé himself, with tongue firmly in cheek), and so Karl Glusman, Aomi Muyock, and, to a lesser extent, Klara Kristin are given ample screen time to run around this understated drama.
The sex is the heart of the film of course, and it is here where Noé focuses all his strength, accentuating the intimacy rather than the lust, doing away with the glamour and urgency of a Hollywood sex scene and working through a range of emotions via various positions and situations. There’s also that great sense of sensuality, particularly with one of the film’s strongest moments: an extended threesome scene set to the irresistible soundtrack of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”.
While depicting passion in it’s rawest form is Noé’s talent here, the screenplay for “Love” is weak at times, bordering on the cheesy for the sake of dull, realistic dialogue that does require a lot of patience, especially towards the end where things do fall apart and we spend more time with a mopey Glusman as he implodes from grief.
Glusman plays Murphy, an American living in Europe who meets and falls in love with Electra (Muyock) with whom he shares a stereotypical, young love type scenario which leads to them moving in together. It’s at this point that they meet Omi (Kristin), a third wheel who seemingly jumps at the prospect of a threesome with the couple, representing the middle-point of the narrative even though the timeline jumps around between Murphy’s annoyingly creepy whispered thoughts and Electra’s pure rage.
Murphy begins having an affair with the couple’s new friend, and as luck would have it, the condom breaks during their first one-on-one encounter and the pro-life Omi falls pregnant. This gives Noé an opportunity to truly test the 3D aspect of the film by showing a penis ejaculating in the walls of what is obviously a vagina, directly onto the camera.
As we jump all over the timeline, Murphy’s relationship with Electra begins to unravel and we are slowly given context for things seen earlier in the film, like Electra’s worried mother leaving a panicked voicemail with Murphy because she believes her daughter may have committed suicide. Though the disjointed timeline is nothing new in Noé’s work, it is used to great effect here; with the high degree of drama going on, the timeline helps us ease into a few scenes and piece together the context ourselves, sustaining interest in the film even when certain scenes drag a bit too much.
Though the screenplay is mostly made up of rather empty lines, Noé cleverly wedges in moments of his own introspection, making this a semi-autobiographical affair with Murphy being an aspiring filmmaker who questions why we don’t see more “sentimental sexuality” in cinema, doing so at a house party in Paris right before he cheats on his girlfriend.
“Love” may not be the strongest offering from the visionary Director, but it continues his undeniable talent for focusing in on a subject and really exploring it with interesting ideas, mainly concerning the more technical side of cinema, for which his talents are most suited.
Review Score: THREE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Love screened as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival 2015
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