Love (2015)
Directed by Gaspar Noé

Film Review

Preceded by expectations and hype that it couldn't possibly live up to, Gaspar Noé's 3D erotic melodrama Love was bound to be the French cinema non-event of the year.  Not so much Fifty Shades of Grey as Umpteen Shades of Beige, Noé's latest attempt to live up to his enfant terrible reputation sees lurid but tastefully composed sex scenes (some apparently non-simulated) crowbarred into what is probably the most painfully over-earnest meditation on the transience of romantic love ever.  The director's boast that the script ran to just seven pages might explain why watching this film is just about the emptiest and most unrewarding experience you can imagine.  Even the occasional bursts of artistic brilliance (something that even a director as self-conscious as Noé is prone to) and a pile of good intentions cannot make up for the lumbering bore fest that is Love.

Lacking in entertainment value it may be, but the film certainly has some worth as aversion therapy for porn addicts.  Having sat through over two hours of life-sapping tedium in which roughly half of the runtime is preoccupied with sex scenes repeated ad nauseum (mostly configurations of standard heterosexual coupling with a coy smidgen of lesbianism thrown in by way of variation), the spectator's appetite for pornographic stimulation is likely to be quenched for life.  To give credit where it is due, Noé shows how we should deal with all taboo subjects - repeat them over and over and over and over and over again until they become so excruciatingly anaemic that they cease to arouse any interest whatsoever.  If, after making sex appear as dull and routine as mowing the lawn, the director could repeat the exercise with cancer, assisted suicide and the biggest no-no of them all - death - he'd probably be doing the human race a great service.

There will doubtless be a few sad wretches (living in parts of the world as yet untainted by internet porn) who will be turned on by Noé's coitus calamity but, for all their abundance, the film's sex scenes are astoundingly unarousing.  Imaginatively shot from various angles, but never showing anything that might possibly result in the film getting an 18 certificate - the innumerable body entanglements are more artistic (in the purist sense of the word) than pornographic, with acres of skin and sinew more resembling some abstract mechanical construct than something as mundane as copulating human beings.  Even the film's most obvious flirtation with hard core porn - a 3D shot of a tumescent male member disgorging itself apparently over our heads - appears too weirdly abstract to have any sexual connotations.  If Noé's intention was to turn sex into mere art, he succeeded well beyond his wildest dreams.

In fact, Gaspar Noé's main motivation for making the film was to portray sex as a beautiful part of a loving relationship.  He got the sex part of the equation right but unfortunately he seems to have totally overlooked the relationship part.  His seven page script clearly didn't allow for much sophistication on either the narrative or character fronts, so inevitably we get a facile ménage-à-trois situation involving three of the shallowest and most boring individuals you can imagine.  Now, with a respectable trio of lead actors Noé might just have got away with this, but unfortunately he throws himself at the tender mercies of two actresses who have no prior acting experience and patently could not act if their lives depended on it - Aomi Muyock and Klara Kristin - and a more experienced actor, Karl Glusman, whose acting skills are barely discernible.  Putting these three unsympathetic so-called thespians together and expecting them to improvise their own dialogue looks like a sure-fire recipe for disaster.  Glusman's gushing verbal assaults, replete with the kind of forced grandiloquence that is more likely to induce multiple bouts of vomiting than admiration, are not something for the faint-hearted or suicidally inclined.  Watching Love with an earplug firmly planted in both ears to block out the excruciating dialogue can only enhance your experience of the film.  A sturdy blindfold and a handful of sleeping tablets may also help.

Love promises to be as provocative as Noé's three previous films - Seul contre tous (1998), Irréversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2009) - but what it actually delivers is something far less spectacular - a lamentably unengaging, badly constructed melodrama that is barely sustained by a succession of graphic sex scenes that are no more shocking these days than a nude painting by Gustave Courbet.  The director's trademark visual flair occasionally bursts through the dross and momentarily has us spellbound, but these moments are too rare and too fleeting to make the film worth the effort.  Love is essentially no more than a full-frontal descent into mediocrity - and maybe this is the most shocking thing about bad boy Noé's latest feature.

Film Synopsis

On the morning of the 1st of January, the telephone rings.  Murphy wakes up with his young wife and their two-year-old child.  On the answer phone there is a message from Electra's anxious mother asking if there has been any news about her daughter, who has been missing for some time and who might well be in the gravest of trouble.  During a long, rainy day, Murphy finds himself alone in his apartment and recalls the most important romance of his life, two years with Electra...