Gaspar Noé Succeeds in Making 3D Porn Boring with LOVE

Love (2015) - Noé
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 they are doing 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 sex completely boring.

Death as the Ultimate Trip

Enter the Void (2009) - Noé

Quite possibly the worst film I've seen in a long time. I'm not saying this because the film is hard-to-take in a typical ugly-side-of-the-humanity, 'Gaspar Noé way' but because it's so painfully boring.

Obviously Noé was going for the psychedelic visual masterpiece á la 2001 Space Odyssey ditching the narrative in the gutter, since the plot is so insipid it had to be intentional- it reminded me of the worst of boy filmmakers' (Luc Besson and Danny Boyle) work, if they ever made R rated films: Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a small time druggie/dealer in Japan who gets killed by the police and spend the rest of the movie floating around watching over his beloved younger sister Lisa (Paz de la Huerta), a stripper, until he is conceived (graphically) and reincarnated again.

Acting is unbearable- two male lead (non actors) are horrendous and de la Huerta again proves she is nothing more than a hot body. In an interview that came with the press kit, Noe talks about wanting to do a film in Japan for a long time because it's so fascinating and since Tokyo is THE city of neon lights. Funny, because in his hands, Tokyo becomes the dullest city in the world.

He really tries hard to invite the audience to FEEL the movie with the first 20 minutes with continuous POV shots, then after Oscar's death, over the shoulder shots of him from his childhood till his death (again!), then overhead crane shots for the rest of the film. The problem is this: The CGI enhanced visuals are at first somewhat impressive. But then it goes on forever, repeating the same boring overhead gliding-over again and again. When the camera descends into and out of various holes and lighting fixtures for the umpteenth time, you feel like you are sitting in a personal cinematic hell. There is really no point looking at your watch anymore- it is purgatory. Fitting. But I'm pretty sure this isn't what Noé intended.

It really does not have that hypnotic power they intended at all. It's worse than blurry visual clusterfuck of Michael Bay action sequence. Noé probably thought he was making a Kubrick but ends up with Transformers painted with Day-Glo. I honestly think 3D is a perfect match for him. If you are still curious about this film, I strongly advise you against seeing it sober.