3.5 let’s-call-them-romantic-trysts out of 4
Gaspar Noé’s Love is a film that does not skirt the line between art and pornography, it does everything short of filming two characters on a casting couch. Characters in love are nothing more than vehicles for sex, angst, and non-linear storytelling. The film is a testament to Noé’s strengths as a director—as a man in love with the idea of skewering, satirizing, and perverting love.
Love tells the story of a threesome of characters gone wrong—quite literally. Opening with the narration of lead male character Murphy, Noé immediately tells his audience that we are not to root for any of these characters. The American Murphy narrates his circumstances by insulting his partner, suggesting that the relationship they share is exclusively a result of the young boy they parent.
Murphy’s story is told in shades of red, green, yellow, and blue, and Benoît Debie’s cinematography paints every scene with individual splashes of colour. The manner in which the film’s overall vocabulary is determined by colour is masterful. Noé’s own direction lends an incredibly detached feeling to the proceedings, often to convey that the audience is nothing more than a group of voyeurs spying on the private lives of intimate people. Noé’s choice to introduce frequent cuts during sequences also points to time’s non-linearity, as well as the audience’s detachment.
Love is very much the story of a relationship, and the film begins with a phone call from a mother concerned about her daughter’s disappearance. Electra, Murphy’s ex-girlfriend, has gone missing, and over the course of 135 excruciatingly long minutes, the audience learns about the many possible reasons for her disappearance.
The film is an evaluation of Murphy’s current frame of mind, as well as Electra’s own psyche, but the decision to frame the two characters together is evidence that Noé wants his audience to believe that the two are inseparable. That Murphy and Omi, the mother of his child, are often framed apart, or with a visual intrusion separating the two is a not-so-subtle hint that the parents are not to be together.
The film promotes itself as a love story, and an explicit amount of time is devoted to exploring the more elicit aspects of Love’s relationship with sex. Noé has stated that many of Love’s more intimate scenes are not choreographed. One assumes that the decision to not stage intimate moments is a desire to portray a kind of gritty realism. The fact is, so much of Love is filled with gratuitous sex that, after the second or third time Electra and Murphy consummate their relationship, I began taking note of subtle shifts in facial expression, lighting, actor positioning, actor positioning, stage layout, and, in the instances that characters were wearing any amount of clothing, costuming.
There’s serious commentary to be made about North American films and their almost castrated approach to love and sex, but Love takes European films’ fascination with the human body to almost cryptographic levels.
For example, in two separate scenes, near the beginning and end of the film, Electra and Murphy have sex. In the first, they make love in a room lit red. The sheets are silk or satin or some other such material. There is nothing on the walls. The two are naked. They are rough with one another. Noé films his actors from overhead.
In the second, Murphy and Electra make love in a room lit yellow-orange. The sheets are white, low-cost cotton. There is nothing on the walls, but the room is filled with the hallmarks of a student dorm. The characters are both wearing white underwear. They are unfamiliar with each other’s bodies, and they are gentle. Noé films his actors in profile.
Circumstances have changed between these two scenes. The audience learns more about Electra and Murphy than one would ever hope to learn. The couple has fallen in lust, and then in love, and then in despair. The two characters are almost unrecognizable between both scenes. Where Noé succeeds is in his depiction of character growth through orgasm. Each intimate moment is shot after a new character reveal. Electra and Murphy grow from students, to lovers, to addicts, to monsters, to humans, and the audience follows them on their journey.
Despite my rating, this is not a good film by any means. Love often plays out like the fever dream of an art-obsessed pornstar. “The world misunderstands my art, therefore I must show the world the art within my art,” one imagines the pornstar bemoaning. Love, however, is a film that must be seen, because it challenges notions of conventional romance—forcing upon its viewers a world filled with lust and sex. In short, it is the most artistic trash I have ever had the honourable dishonour of forcing myself to sit through.