Explicitly boring 3D sex film
Gaspar Noé’s three-way drama Love fails big-time on all acounts
CANNES, FRANCE— You couldn’t have a Cannes Film Festival without at least one movie causing a stir for its explicit sex.
Gaspar Noé’s 3D, three-way drama Love looked to be this year’s heavy breather, but it’s now creating a fuss for having failed to deliver on its promise of provocation, following two packed screenings Thursday morning. The first was just past midnight in the Grand Théâtre Lumière, when several hundred people were reportedly turned away from the over-attended world premiere.
The word for this badly acted, lazily scripted and excruciatingly shagged film is banal — which means the same thing in both French and English.
This comes as a real shock, given the reputation for pushing the boundaries of arousal that has long been attached to Noé, a Buenos Aires-born French filmmaker. His 2002 film Irreversible, starring a then-unknown Monica Bellucci as the victim of a savage rape the camera savours, prompted tearful walkouts at its Cannes premiere and also at its subsequent TIFF presentation.
Noé’s Enter the Void in 2009 was less controversial and more artful, yet still prompted mild outrage for its intimation of sibling incest in the afterlife.
There were about a dozen or so walkouts at Thursday’s 11 a.m. press screening of Love, by both men and women, but if they were leaving for reasons other than sheer boredom, I’d be astonished. Fellow critics I spoke with afterward all expressed 50 shades of surprise and disappointment.
Advance hype on Love sold the sizzle of watching actors have real sex on the screen, in 3D no less. There were a series of eye-popping posters, most of which can’t be shown in a family newspaper (or mobile device).
It delivers on the sex, many times over, like a porn film shot by a professional cinematographer and variously scored to pastoral flutes or Pink Floyd-style guitar rock.
The athletic ardour includes exactly the kind of “money shot” you’d expect from a Gaspar Noé excursion into the third dimension.
But the humping is mechanical and frankly not very erotic. Anyone with access to an Internet connection could see far raunchier stuff online.
The film opens with naked couple Murphy (Karl Glusman) and Electra (Aomi Muyock) manually stimulating each other to the point of climax.
In the next scene, Murphy awakens in bed with another woman, a blond named Omi (Klara Kristin), who turns out to be the mother of his 2-year-old son, whom we’ll later learn is named Gaspar. (The immodest filmmaker also names one of Electra’s ex-boyfriends Noé, played by Jean Couteau, who has an art gallery named Noé.)
The slim story proceeds more or less backwards, much like Irreversible, revealing Murphy to be an American film student in Paris, Electra his French artist girlfriend and Omi a frisky neighbour who gets enticed into a three-way fling that plays predictable havoc with the Murphy/Electra love bond.
The rest of the film shows how the couple’s amour flowered and wilted, but tragic romance this isn’t, especially when you factor in betrayals (on both sides), drug abuse and further sexual adventures. (Murphy’s panic when Electra introduces him to a game transsexual for another threesome offers some amusement.)
The misogynistic and homophobic Murphy spends a great deal of time berating himself via voiceover as a “loser” (no argument there), and uttering such banal sentiments as “Love is strange” and “Life is what you make of it.”
At one point, Murphy tells Electra that he wants to make a film that “truly depicts sentimental sexuality.”
He’s really speaking for writer/ director Noé, who says in his production notes that he’s always dreamed of making a film “that would fully reproduce the passion of a young couple in love, in all its physical and emotional excesses.”
He failed big-time, largely because he’s chosen for his movie three vacant people who have physical attributes to spare but not a hint of acting ability. (Glusman has had smaller parts in other films but Muyock and Kristin are complete rookies.)
Love will likely do the film festival rounds later this year (a TIFF berth is a safe bet) but it’s unlikely to ever see the dark of a mainstream multiplex, because the full-frontal penetrative sex will draw a highly restrictive rating and/or a demand for major cuts from censors, especially in the U.S.
Love isn’t eligible for the Palme d’Or, because Cannes programmers placed it out of competition the midnight program. We now know why.
In the end, the most surprising thing about Love is how conservative its message is: that infidelity, promiscuity and drug abuse are all bad ideas.
Who’d have expected such an adult lesson from a bad boy such as Gaspar Noé? Follow on Twitter: @peterhowellfilm