Friday, November 6, 2015

Gaspar Noé Succeeds in Making 3D Porn Boring with LOVE

Love (2015) - Noé
 photo 88648115-0dfc-4eb4-8a6a-9e6c48ec2116_zps8kps4vj6.jpg
I predicted after watching Enter the Void that Gaspar Noé and the 3D format are the perfect match. So he makes a movie in 3D here and the end result makes Void like Citizen Kane in comparison. People walked out of a Cronenberg's Crash screening I was in. But its repeated sexual act in that film had a point. Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac at least has the director's anger and cynicism, a general fuck you to the world. What does Love have? Banality. As usual, Noé mistakes banality for sincerity. And after 4 feature films, he still remains a filmmaker with nothing much to say.

Love starts with a young American film student, Murphy (Karl Glusman) living in Paris, narrating that his life has gone to shit. He lives with a young blonde girl (Klara Kristy) and their toddler named Gaspar. He recalls the good times he had with Electra (Aomi Muyok). He longs to go back to when he first fell in love with Electra who is now missing. We retrace their affairs, not chronologically. We see them engaging in graphic sexual activities for most of the movie's running time - two of them alone, threesome, orgies. Whenever they are not using their mouths for sexual act, they engage in downright laughable conversations. Right. Someone OK'd the project with such precious lines as this:

What's the meaning of life?
Love.
How come there are no movies about first love and sex? I'll make the first movie that shows the sentimentality of sex!

I understand what Noé is going for. Yes, the first love and its sex make a great impression on people's lives. But there are many other filmmakers who tackled it much more gracefully, effectively and touchingly than Noé. The characters are so banal and insufferable, you wish them to stop whatever and just disappear. Acting is uniformly horrendous. OK, Muyok is slightly better as she has some charisma. There is a hot threesome in the early part of the film but as it goes along, it becomes more and more unbearable. OK. With all his macho posturing, Noé seems squeamish about showing giant erect penis in 3D. Why else would you shoot a movie without things sticking out and shooting something off of it in 3D. But when the brief "money shot" arrives, it's so uneventful, you can easily shrug it off. One hard task Noé accomplishes with Love is that he makes a porn completely boring.