Love (2015)
Directed by Gaspar Noé
Murphy is an American living in Paris who enters a highly sexually and emotionally charged relationship with the unstable Electra. Unaware of the seismic effect it will have on their relationship, they invite their pretty neighbor into their bed.
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(He also namedrops “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a Noe fave he’s cited on film before.)
This is another trip into the director’s ceaselessly self-explaining universe of archetypes, 2001: A Space Odyssey references, and New Age philosophy, and though Noé ( Enter The Void , Irréversible ) is by turns naïve, juvenile, and clumsily literalist, he is also a filmmaker stubbornly committed to making movies that don’t look or move like anyone else’s.
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.
Noé, like Michelangelo Antonioni, Alfred Hitchcock, or Stanley Kubrick (Murphy's favorite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey), uses his actors more as props, synecdoches, or ideas rather than as people who are there to give phenomenal acting performances — although Monica Bellucci (Alex) and Vincent Cassell (Marcus) are ferociously good in much of Irreversible.
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.
Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004) follows a similar tune as Love (a man looks back on a lost love) but dragged at 69 minutes long.
Arthouse fare featuring copious unsimulated sex and little else is hardly extraordinary any longer and Love actually belongs to the abortive tradition of such films as Michael Winterbottom’s equally ineffectual 9 Songs.
Other directors (Michael Winterbottom in 9 Songs, John Cameron Mitchell in Shortbus) have dragged real sex away from the realm of porn, though never at quite this . . .
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”).
Noe's reputation as an in-your-face provocateur of the cinema is cemented here, and he rejoins a growing number of respected directors delving into the once-taboo realm of the sexual senses, among them Michael Winterbottom ("9 Songs"), Lars von Trier ("Nymphomaniac") and Virginie Despentes ("Baise-Moi").
El erotismo embotado va hacia atrás, siempre estructural y narrativamente hacia atrás, retrocediendo paulatina y categóricamente en el tiempo, como en todos los filmes de Noé, pues por algo Irreversible fue el modelo insuperado de las segundas ficciones de Arriaga-Iñárritu, por bloques-planos secuencia (en sus inicios) o por largos y sinuosos segmentos reiterativos (como ahora), remontándose a los orígenes de la trama, hasta llegar virtualmente a su semilla: el inolvidable primer encuentro idealizado Murphy-Electra, pero también va simbólica, moral, ética e intelectualmente hacia atrás en la evolución de las costumbres sensuales, retrogradándose y retrogradando al auditorio, ya que la ficción, partiendo del visceral desdén ilustrado a cualquier relación doméstica-domesticada tradicional o clásica o absoluta según Jung o constructora de la libertad del otro a lo Sartre, condena de antemano cualquier búsqueda de otras formas de expresión sexual, abocándolas al fracaso, fundiéndolas y co…
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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.
It's a neat structure, similar to Irreversible, but maybe I was distracting myself with that aspect because none of the three main characters are remotely likable people.
We can’t print the depravities in “I Stand Alone,” “Irreversible” and “Enter the Void,” but the big shocks in “Love” are more goofy, couldn’t-resist, including two separate cases where Glusman’s member stares right at us and shoots out the camera lens.
In his director’s statement, Noé, who is best known for 2003's "Irreversible" and 2009's "Enter the Void," says he wanted “to film the organic dimension of love.”
He did it with graphic violence in I Stand Alone (1998), with extreme sexual torture in Irréversible (2002), and with mind-melting, sick-making visuals in Enter the Void (2009).
For those familiar with the work of Argentine-French provocateur Gaspar Noé (the cheaply brutal "Irreversible," the gorgeous head trip "Enter the Void"), the prospect of a love story told primarily through close-up, explicit, 3-D coitus might sound as much an attention-grabbing threat as a promise to excite.
Before that was "Irreversible," noted for its reverse-chronological plot and a brutal and borderline unwatchable on-screen rape scene with Monica Bellucci - one of the few such scenes I would defend as integral to the plot for the devastating effect it has on what comes before and after.
Sólo baste ver dos ejemplos de películas que ya han tratado el tema sin tanto escándalo y cursilería: la genial Bitter Moon de Roman Polanski (1992) y aquella obra maestra final de Stanley Kubrick llamada Eyes Wide Shut (el “we need to fuck” del final).
Murphy expresses a desire to replicate "sentimental sexuality onscreen," a feat already accomplished in more ambitious projects ranging from John Cameron Mitchell’s "Shortbus" to Catherine Breillat’s "Anatomy of Hell," both of which explore the prospects of intercourse to communicate real ideas.
Other directors (Michael Winterbottom in 9 Songs, John Cameron Mitchell in Shortbus) have dragged real sex away from the realm of porn, though never at quite this . . .
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”).
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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”).
It is the director rummaging through his past loves and crafting a story that is a narcissistic parade of all things Noé with (not so sly) asides (to wit: Murphy keeps drugs in a VHS case for I Stand Alone; there is a model of the Love Hotel from Enter the Void in his apartment; Noé shows up in a cameo as one of Electra's ex-boyfriends, a pretentious art dealer billed as Aaron Pages (anagrams!)).
We can’t print the depravities in “I Stand Alone,” “Irreversible” and “Enter the Void,” but the big shocks in “Love” are more goofy, couldn’t-resist, including two separate cases where Glusman’s member stares right at us and shoots out the camera lens.
He did it with graphic violence in I Stand Alone (1998), with extreme sexual torture in Irréversible (2002), and with mind-melting, sick-making visuals in Enter the Void (2009).
Whereas Noe over-amplified his own sex- and violence-related fantasies in his three previous features (beginning with the bloody “I Stand Alone”), here, the helmer strips away such hyperbole to reveal his naked soul.
Noé is addicted to self-references: Murphy—who, like the Argentinean-born director, came to Paris for film school, not speaking a word of French—stashes drugs in a VHS case for Noé’s debut, I Stand Alone , and has a scale model of one of the fantasy buildings from Enter The Void; in framing scenes that show him slightly older, he has a young son named Gaspar.
Ya sea por su obsesión con lo explícito (la violencia, el sexo o el drama) o los argumentos que sostienen sus películas, desde la formidable y violenta I Stand Alone, su ópera prima, el nombre del director argentino se ha caracterizado por acompañar retratos ultra violentos de realidades sórdidas francesas.