In 'Love,' Murphy essentially relives a past life. He is not however in control of his emotions, so his memories are fragmented, and out of order. He recalls Electra because her mother calls him, giving him a sentimental oasis to cling to in order to escape his life with Omi. Still, in flashbacks, we see how Murphy's relationship with Omi ironically started because of Electra, and how Electra and Murphy's relationship was always a co-dependent one. He, a film student with posters of 'Saló,' and 'Story of O' hanging ostentatiously on his bedroom wall, jealously obsesses over her. But eventually she, an aspiring painter, reveals that she's just as concerned with being protected. They form an unhealthy relationship that expresses itself through violent outbursts, and copious sex scenes that range from genuinely sexy to mechanically frantic. So while Electra accuses Murphy of being a bright young man who doesn't know what love is, she's just as impulsive.
Since Noé ('Enter the Void,' 'Irreversible') wants to steep viewers in Murphy's confused emotions, the experience of watching 'Love' can sometimes be more frustrating than thinking about the meaning of 'Love' while you watch the film. In fact, 'Love' probably only works if you see it as a paradoxically over-determined work of and about sensuality. Noé uses 3-D photography but also never stops reminding viewers that they are outside of the frame, as he directly acknowledges in one scene where an erect penis thrusts directly at the camera before ejaculating CGI semen. You can't watch this movie and ever really forget that you're watching a movie, as is reinforced by the film's elliptically-structured plot, droning soundtrack and periodic mid-scene black-out cuts. That's because Murphy is, like some of Noé's previous blank slate heroes, a character who remembers himself at his most frustratingly vacant.
Murphy thinks he knows it all, but is unfailingly clueless, as we see when he first meets Electra, and blurts out 'What's the meaning of life?' and she quickly responds in kind: 'Love.' Noé's movie is about characters who want to stay nestled in the past, as is evidenced by his frequent use of reddish-brown camera filters, and symmetrical frames-within-camera-frames compositions. 'Love' is about an angry, sulking character who think he wants to make a 'sentimental' romance featuring sex, but is ultimately incapable (and essentially uninterested) of seeing outside of himself.
But what's it like to actually watch 'Love'? This is a movie where non-professional actors and unsimulated sex scenes constantly encourage viewers to form a bond of alienation, instead of a bond of sympathy, with Murphy. That may sound pretentious, but Noé knows exactly the type of effect he wants to achieve, and he mostly gets it. His biggest gamble is the use of first-time actors to elicit complex emotions. But he builds a complex relationship between Murphy and his viewers throughout the movie, one that speaks louder than the unmoving, shrill line-readings from all three of the film's principle characters.
The film's sex scenes are similarly mannered, mournful and distractingly graphic. But they're not just endurance tests, or frustrating slogs either. Noé wants you to see sex as a cocoon, so he genuinely tries to show you what attracts his young characters to each other. His earnest objectification of actors' bodies is, in that sense, often compelling. We look at bodies in motion, and see them as body parts first, and then people trying to get lost in each other, to give each other pleasure, and to remain lost in sensations that will always remain mysterious to anyone who isn't experiencing them first-hand. 'Love' may not always be enjoyable, but it leaves an abiding mark.
Love | |
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Directed by | Gaspar Noé |
Produced by | Vincent Maraval |
Written by | Gaspar Noé |
Starring |
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Music by | |
Cinematography | Benoît Debie |
Edited by |
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Distributed by | Wild Bunch |
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135 minutes[2][3] | |
Country |
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Language | English[2] |
Budget | €2.55 million[1] ($2.9 million) |
Box office | $860,896[4] |
Love is a 2015 eroticdramaart film[5] written and directed by Gaspar Noé.[6] The film marked Noé's fourth directorial venture after a gap of five years. It had its premiere at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and was released in 3D.
Murphy is an American cinema school student, living in Paris. He had a French girlfriend, called Electra, whom he dated for two years. One day, Murphy and Electra met and had a no-strings-attached threesome with another woman, a young blonde Danish teenager named Omi, as a way to add some excitement to their love life. But later, Murphy had sex with Omi behind Electra's back, as a result of which Omi became pregnant. This unplanned pregnancy ended the relationship between Murphy and Electra on a horrible note, and it forced Murphy to marry Omi.
On a rainy January morning, Electra's mother, Nora, phones Murphy at his small Paris apartment where he lives with Omi and their 18-month-old son to ask him if he's heard from the young woman, because she hasn't for three months, and given her daughter's suicidal tendencies, she is really worried. For the rest of this day, Murphy recalls his past two years with Electra in a series of fragmented, nonlinear flashbacks; how they first met in Paris, their quick hookup, and their lives over the next two years which is filled with drug abuse, rough sex and tender moments.
Love is the screen debut of the two main actresses of the film, Muyock and Kristin.[7] Noé met them in a club. He found Karl Glusman for the role of Murphy through a mutual friend.[8]
The budget of the film was around €2.6 million.[1]Principal photography took place in Paris.[6]
In a pre-release interview with Marfa Journal, Gaspar implied that the film will have an explicitly sexual feel: 'will give guys a hard-on and make girls cry'.[9] The sex scenes were unsimulated and most were not choreographed.[10] There was barely a script and Noé would set up different real-life meetings with the actors.
The week before its debut at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the film's U.S. distribution rights were acquired by Alchemy.[11][12] It was selected to be screened in the Vanguard section of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.[13]The film also screened in Indian film festival The International Film Festival of Kerala held in Thiruvananthapuram in the world cinema category.[14]
The film received mixed reviews, with 39% on Rotten Tomatoes, an average rating of 4.9/10, sampled from 85 reviews. The websites consensus states: 'Love sees writer-director Gaspar Noé delivering some of his warmest and most personal work; unfortunately, it's also among his most undeveloped and least compelling.'[15] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 51 out of 100 based on reviews from 27 critics, indicating 'mixed or average reviews'.[16]
Love, Gaspar Noe’s sexy sex filled art house adventure
“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. Play online games ben 10 omniverse 2.
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. 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.
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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