Love (Gaspar Noé, 2015)

[mfunk9786]

NSFW teaser posters for Gaspar Noé's "joyous" 2015 film about sex, Love:

Poster 1
Poster 2

[Peter-H]

Somewhat NSFW teaser clip

[LittleFerret]

Love is currently On Demand.

I haven't liked any of Noe's films, but I must admit I'm mildly curious about this one.

[Peter-H]

"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."

Pretty surprised there isn't a thread for this so far. Has anyone seen it?

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[Numero Trois]

I haven't liked any of Noe's films, but I must admit I'm mildly curious about this one.

His output certainly doesn't give one any reason to think Love will be worth the time. I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be the pithiest line written about it:

Noé's homages and history-of-cinema jokes make it clear that all his steady, stately kink is designed to awe rather than to sweep us up. "I want to make movies out of blood, sperm, and tears," Murphy natters at one point, before dressing down his lover for never having seen 2001, a film not known for its sensual rawness. Noé cuts on occasion to a red bulb in close-up that, but for its blinking, might as well be the movies' most infamous computer. If you ever wondered what HAL might jerk off to, Love is for you.

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[Lost Highway]

Noé's films are as dumb as a box of rocks but his DOP Benoît Debie is such an outstanding artist in his own right, I look at Noé's films mostly as a vehicle for Debie's cinematography. There are other compensations like the sound design, which usually is inventive, like the voice of the POV protagonist in Enter the Void being at the centre of the sound field. In the end I don't think he is that different from Von Trier whose films I find similarly intellectually shallow and attention seeking but at least I find Noé more formally interesting.

[mfunk9786]

You lost me big time in that last sentence.

[Lost Highway]

You lost me big time in that last sentence.

Von Trier has made one thing which I think is fantastic and the was Riget and that worked because he wasn't straining to be profound and he wasn't being cynical. Since then I've been rooting for him to make something else I'll like, but so far I haven't been able to take anything he's done since seriously. He's very entertaining in interviews though, I'll give him that.

[copen]

By the same token, Noe's first film "I Stand Alone", and its' short film prequel "Carne" were quite good.

[colinr0380]

I'd even put up a defence for the forceful and beautifully structured, if arguably superficial in what it did with its various inflammatory subject matters, Irreversible. Though with that film I'd credit the trio of main performances and the propulsive Thomas Bangalter score just as much as the direction with making that film as good as it was (and Carne and I Stand Alone had that searing performance and incessant ranting voice over by Philippe Nahon to drive things along).

I'm unsure about what is happening with Noé's work. He seems to be paring his films down to make a grand statement on a particular 'big' theme, but that paradoxically seems to be leaving any sense of humanity behind. Or maybe its the blank slate actors and characters that are being used in these more recent films (perhaps thats the ultimate horror that the older generation have about the younger one - that they actually aren't thinking anything! Or have any principles in their love affairs!). Rather than having too much to say (no matter how horrible or dodgily presented) something like Enter The Void has its couple of main ideas but then leaves them standing fully exposed, unexplored, on stage surrounded by production design frantically embellishing all around that glaring absence.

[colinr0380]

Major spoilers:

Well, I don't know how he did it but Gaspar Noé somehow managed to make a more unlikeable protagonist than the main character of Seul Contre Tous! Murphy here is the architect of all his problems, and somehow manages to make everything in his relationships all about him - he is the one whose muttering voiceover talks about being "trapped in a cage" by Omi and his son, the (ironically pro-life) girl initially invited to the threesome that he ended up accidentally making pregnant whilst seeing her separately on the side; he has fears that Omi's going to end up "turning him gay" by all her attention on their son, maybe significantly named Gaspar (Perhaps Noé took the cue from the end of Enter The Void and has reincarnated himself as this couple's son, taking the perspective of a, loved but unplanned, child? The film itself doesn't really have too many contemporary references in it. It all feels like it could be taking place in some really tuned into the exploitation world zeitgeist of the mid 70s for all the movie memorabilia on the walls from that period and slightly retro camera equipment. But just as much it could be taking place in a timeless space too); his violent feelings of betrayal by his girlfriend Electra fooling around on the side, which are so hypocritical they could practically act as a definition of the term in a dictionary; and so on.

This is probably all because the film takes the form of someone, after getting a telephone call from their ex's mother wondering if he has heard from her in the last few months, spending the whole day moping around his apartment reminiscing about the path not taken (because he got forced into another relationship by the pregnancy) and better times with 'the one that got away and probably committed suicide because their relationship meant so much to her that she must have'. The film is told entirely from Murphy's perspective as much as Enter The Void's was from Oscar's, and as such is solipsistic, narcissistic and full of unexamined prejudice and shifting of blame for basically all the problems in the relationship (of course Electra was the one most into drugs; of course she's the truly jealous one while ignoring Murphy's own pain at being cheated on; she's the one whose fantasy has always been a threesome with a girl(!); she uses Omi's pregnancy as an excuse to jump into the arms of Murphy's best friend, etc, etc), though I'm open to the idea that this making the main male lead so repulsively dislikable may be Noé's intention here. Certainly as with most of Noé's previous films, it has a very dim view of the male sex in general as just being unthinking penises on legs for the most part! Electra and even Omi here come across as much more nuanced and rounded characters (Omi in particular gets that rather heartrending brief shot at the end of the film of closing the door on Murphy crying over his lost relationship with Electra in the bathtub, seemingly well aware of his lack of any particular love for her), but even so they seem damned by sticking around with this idiot for as long as they have done!

Its not in the same league at all but I did keep thinking of Godard's Contempt at times whilst watching Love, especially since both films start out with a long, setting the tone for things to follow, nude scene, and the way that both films are about a guy actively screwing up his relationship so he can feel vindicated once the girl leaves him. (Of course its her fault: she gets the 'intellectual' glasses at the halfway mark, while Murphy himself describes himself as a "bonehead" dimwit, looking to her for guidance that she just does not provide!)

I've got to admit that Noé still makes a stylish film though, even when the content is basically a room and a bed and a couple of people shagging! Or a corridor and a flight of stairs and a couple of people making out! Or a waterfall cave (a 'lover's leap' suicide spot?) with a couple of people necking! Or the curve of an undergound parking garage with a couple of figures pressed against the concrete! You get the picture by now, I'm sure! (Though its all less J.G. Ballard and a bit more Adrian Lyne!)

And there are a few beautiful scenes of characters talking in front of giant mural backdrops in a cafe, which presumably would really stand out if seen in 3D. Noé even cuts to a brief shot of a framed landscape painting in its frame as if to emphasise that artificiality at that point too.

There are a couple of big differences to Enter The Void: I wonder if the 3D process played the major part in calming the editing of this film down from the wildly dizzying, spinning and lunging, always moving camera of Irreversible and Enter The Void. In some ways everything plays much flatter in Love, and there are regular brief 'black outs' that cut the scenes themselves into smaller chunks. The main characters all seem posed as if on a stage in front of their backdrops, which can either be distant objects or just the primary blocks of colour of their bedsheets. Even Murphy has a habit of walking out of a room and standing in the doorway of it to make telephone calls or look at other characters, as if he needs to be in that foreground transitional space where all the action is, commanding it.

That worked for me as I found this different style actually made Love much easier to sit through than the almost painful (certainly wearying) to watch Enter The Void was, but paradoxically Enter The Void feels like the more '3D' film with all of its objects incessantly strafing the camera and plunging into every available orifice. In Love, though I was always prepared to gleefully shout it at the screen, I was only able to do the 3D call of "Aaaarggh! It's coming right at me! Literally this time!" just two or three times! And yes Love does feature the inevitable 'penis moving back and forth inside vagina' shot, which I think is literally the same shot from the end of Enter The Void! (I presume this is just re-use of CGI assets, but it did make me idly wonder whether all of Gaspar Noé's leading men share the same penis! Maybe its like the prosthetic penis in Catherine Breillat's Sex Is Comedy film - one size fits all!)

The other difference from Enter The Void is that this time there actually is a soundtrack to a lot of the action, which helps a lot in comparison to the low key subliminal drones of the afterlife in the previous film. It is all pre-existing music though rather than a created score as in Irreversible, so the cultural references covering the walls of Murphy's apartment here seep into the music arrangement of our pop-culture addled reminiscer's story - so during the already too good to be true lengthy central threesome scene we get the gently weeping guitars of Before The Beginning heightening the grinding (if this film has taught me anything about threesomes, it is that the person on the bottom of the pile is in serious danger of suffocation! Or at least of having their neck broken!). There's Pink Floyd, Brian Eno and a ton of classical music tracks (including the Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould, probably better known these days as the Hannibal Lecter theme!)

I particularly liked the film references thrown into the soundtrack though - the Brian Eno track from For All Mankind (which fits with a lead character whose favourite film is 2001: A Space Odyssey!) and the Booby Beausoleil track from Lucifer Rising. But in particular I found the use of an instrumental version of the lullaby theme from Deep Red very amusing and appropriate for the bunch of scenes where the condom breaks during sex, the discussion of Omi thinking she is pregnant and looking at the pregancy test! (Childhood and horrible potential violence being equated there!)

And, wow, I never knew that underground red strobe lit, sex-orgy clubs had people doing all manner of naughty things to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 score! Those are certainly catchier tunes than the whining drones that the patrons of the gay club in Irreversible were given to listen to!

While on the subject of all the references it is probably pointless to go through all the film posters in Murphy's room (or rather Murphy's room before Omi and the child turns it into something less of a cinephile's den, with only Enter The Void's Love Hotel model on a cupboard as a last reminder of naughtier, more cinephiliac times!), but I often kept finding the set dressing more interesting than the characters themselves! My absolute favourite piece of film referencing turned up not in Murphy's apartment though but in the interrogation room in the police station where you can see the "Qui a vu cette femme?"/"Have you seen this woman?" poster with the picture of Johanna ter Steege on it from the original version of The Vanishing! Which seems an appropriate prop for a police station and for Love's story about the disappearance of Electra too! And depressing for the suggestion that apparently the investigation into the disappearance of the characters from The Vanishing is still ongoing 27 years on!

One aspect very like Enter The Void though was the interesting way that Noé is taking his story and breaking it apart into achronological chunks. So we get the entire story told in flashback by an unreliable narrator, but also he keeps flashing back to different sections in different orders, such as Omi's pregnancy and the painful breakup with Electra being the first, most recent and rawest memory to surface. Then the threesome, then back into pure Electra and Murphy relationship stuff. Omi herself drops out of the film for the majority of the final two thirds, suggesting just how little Murphy thinks about her aside from her 'forcing' the break up on them, until coming back wordlessly to look in on Murphy weeping in the tub after his long, hard day of mooning over his previous girl.

I think the best scenes in the film come towards the end, with that beautiful long walk that Electra and Murphy do through the graveyard after all their attempts at spicing up their sex lives (and upping the ante on each other) with sex clubs and transsexual prostitutes have not really helped much, and they are talking together about death (presumably where Murphy is getting the idea that Electra is suicidal from) and the end of their relationship. As they walk down the path together walls start to build up on either side of the sad and jaded couple, getting higher and higher until they are totally surrounded and the shot ends in the darkness of an Irreversible-style tunnel.

Then that scene is immediately followed by Murphy and Electra's very first meeting ever, in a little temple-style pagoda on the top of a hill in a park (which perhaps is reminiscent of the Tower of Babel poster in Murphy's room earlier in the film). Murphy and Electra say goodbye to their friends (including the best friend she will end up with after Murphy) and proceed to do another walk down a long hill, but this time it is light and airy and they even cross a bridge, ending up with Murphy declaring that he doesn't want to leave her rather than in a tunnel acknowledging their relationship is finished.

It is like Murphy in his reminiscing is overwriting the actual collapse of the relationship by retrating all the way back to the beginning and the very first time he and Electra ever made love, when their bodies were new to each other. And from there it goes to the bathroom in which Murphy is reminiscing in, as he thinks back to the (long broken) promises he and Electra made to always protect each other. Omi doesn't interrupt him but his son does and we leave the present Murphy and his son naked in the bathtub weeping together for their lost youth.

The whole film feels like a nostalgic look back at an irreversibly dead relationship, only this character despite his begging voiceover isn't going to get reincarnated as his lover's new son or anything like that! But he is going to get a Seul Contre Tous style uncomfortable father-child bonding scene instead! (And maybe that either-or ending of Seul Contre Tous is a good reference for Love, as this is about obsessing over chances squandered and a life going down what seems like a dead end path away from your dreams, rather than towards them)

Murphy to Electra, holding each other in the tub: "I'll love you 'til the end"
*10 seconds later, a big title card saying The End*

[Trees]

Enter the Void Enter was as degenerate as it was mesmerizing. I'll give this one a try.

[colinr0380]

I'd probably say that Enter The Void retains its spot as Noé's 'magnum opus' or "the ultimate trip" to quote the 2001: A Space Odyssey poster! Despite the drug stuff in Love and Murphy taking the last ecstasy pill from his stash of drugs that he and Electra picked up together to in some ways kick off his reminiscing (I'm not familiar with how ecstasy trips work, so I'm open to the idea that the rest of the film is following the highs and lows of Murphy's drug trip, ending with him a blubbing wreck in his tub!) there is not really the equivalent lightshow of the subjective drug trip near the beginning of Enter The Void. There are two shots looking up through of a kind of strobing kaleidoscopic tunnel, which is reminiscent of the trip towards the light fitting just after Oscar is shot in Enter The Void, though given the second comes just after the 'penis pumping in vagina' scene it might just stand for an overly idealised, glittery version of a vagina to get drawn into!

Enter The Void is also the much more button pushing one in terms of its controversial content (though the pro-life Omi here, with the brief discussion of her never existing if her parents had the choice about it, feels obviously meant to relate back to the abortion/ghost taking the previous baby's place reincarnation aspect of Enter The Void. Maybe the suggestion is that Omi is perhaps the equivalent of the baby never given a chance in that film, and perhaps Murphy himself would have preferred it if she had been for all of his horrible comments on her having trapped him, rather than vice versa), while Love has much more of a soppy, pining tone to it. Murphy says something to the effect in the party scene of wishing there were more "sentimental sex" films out there, and thats how this film plays, rather than the literally more detached protagonist of Enter The Void.

They're both adolescent films though and these last two films are entirely explorations of their character's psyche. I kind of prefer Love more because at least here we get a bit of insight into what Murphy is actually thinking, while Oscar of course goes 'beyond the infinite' after the first third of the film to become a disembodied spirit and it is never entirely clear what he is actually thinking about the scenes flashing before his eyes, at least until the implications become too bluntly explicit to miss!

Whether (as in Seul Contre Tous as well) you think these characters have psyches that are particularly worth exploring is up to your tolerance for self obsessed scumbags I guess! (The most unbelievable aspect of the film for me was that this completely insensitive character would have so many posters for M, Salo, Taxi Driver, Birth of a Nation etc all over his walls! It is literally a cinephile's wet dream of a set! You'd think that the content of those films would have made him a more thoughtful person just by osmosis though, but no!)

Irreversible is still my favourite Noé film by some margin, perhaps due to the sense of a wider, more detached, force viewing the characters brutally hurting each other rather than 'taking the side' or privileging the perspective of one character over everyone else, but Noé seems deep into the subjectivity hole at this point.

[bergstruhm]

Saw this back in November at a festival and found it surprisingly great. Yes, the acting is (understandably) awful and yes, the writing is forced and cheesy. I laughed out loud when Murphy wore the exact same Fassbinder t-shirt as Noé owns (can you be more obvious?). Still, I thought the film had a really great flow to it; the soundtrack and editing in combination with the fragmented narrative created a really mesmerizing film-going experience. I might also add that seeing the film at a breakfast-screening with yoghurt hand-outs, I kid you not combined with the explicit sex scenes (and the now infamous cum-shot) made for a very strange time at the movies.

I think people calling this nothing but glorified porn should think twice about how they define porn. As far as I'm concerned, porn exists for the sole reason of arousing the viewer. I don't know about you all, but I certainly never got the impression that Noé was trying to make a "sexy" film in the traditional sense of the word (I would, however, have no issue calling it a visually sexy film, if that makes sense). What are your stances on that?

Apart from the acting - which I can forgive - I did find the lackluster use of 3D disappointing. The sex scenes were gorgeously shot but the added image played just about no part in that. Would've been nice to see shots with legs and arms stretched out towards the lens, for instance. But whatever.

[colinr0380]

I think people calling this nothing but glorified porn should think twice about how they define porn. As far as I'm concerned, porn exists for the sole reason of arousing the viewer. I don't know about you all, but I certainly never got the impression that Noé was trying to make a "sexy" film in the traditional sense of the word (I would, however, have no issue calling it a visually sexy film, if that makes sense). What are your stances on that?

Some of the scenes are meant to be pulling the audience into feeling the same sense of losing themselves in the sex as the characters, but its all in the wider context of a complete relationship breakdown. A relationship that seemed only to be built on sex, drugs and an intense feeling of possessive jealousy and firery arguments in the backseats of taxis.

In a sense Omi's invitation for the threesome that backfires on Murphy and Electra begins as being presented as the ultimate wish fulfilment fantasy but with the context provided of the ante-upping scenes towards the end just feels like that threesome was the last in the series of escalating provocations that Murphy and Electra were making to each other, in a strange mix of angrily challenging the other and then when their bluff is called trying to grit their teeth through the situation to make it work (a little reminiscent of Polanski's Bitter Moon film). In that sense perhaps Electra's unbelievable proposing the threesome with a girl is the consequence of pushing Murphy over the breaking point with the transsexual prostitute just before (Murphy just cannot take a penis being thrust in his face, while Electra's breaking point is Murphy making Omi pregnant). Murphy and Electra are dragging people around them into the orbit of their disintegrating relationship, beginning with willing sex club patrons and hired prostitutes before eventually just seducing their nubile next door neighbour, in the most dumb move of all! I feel more for Omi in this than either Murphy or even Electra - at least Electra got out, Omi just seems to be treated like the glorified sex toy-turned-live in nanny left holding the baby by the end of this to Murphy.

It might all be harrowing and slightly depressing about male-female relationships in the usual Noé way but in a way this (as Enter The Void before it, and at least one of the endings of Seul Contre Tous) actually is playing out as a sexual fantasy. Its all Murphy spending a day wandering around his apartment and thinking back on his time with Electra. But really its about him solipsistically thinking about himself above all, given that Murphy never actually finds out (or puts much real effort into uncovering) where Electra actually disappeared off to! She's more significant to him as a memory to languish in and an ideal to yearn longingly for, long gone as a real person before the film even began.

[colinr0380]

I started watching LOVE the other night. The film literally starts off with a straight-up porno scene set to Erik Satie.... oh boy.

I'm going to transplant the comment from the Festival Circuit 2016 thread so as not to derail it too much, but your comment inspired me Trees! This might just be because I'm getting jaded by Noé's films at this point but I remember feeling quite relieved, rather than shocked, that this time around he cuts straight to the interminable masturbation scene rather than builds up to it! (Noé's short in the Destricted anthology film seems a good reference point here, as it was basically a ten minute film of characters masturbating that got its point across in five and then spent the next five minutes waiting for its climax to eventually arrive!)

Its also interesting in retrospect that this rather gruelling (in the sense of just mechanically taking forever!) scene between Murphy and Omi starts the film but chronologically is actually the final sex act that takes place the night before Murphy gets the news of Electra's disappearance the next morning that inspires his nostalgia. It sort of seems meant to play a bit frustratingly, as Omi is just pounding away while Murphy is just laying there, seemingly barely aroused until eventually (and perhaps begrudgingly!) climaxing after Omi's sheer persistence rules out!

[Trees]

SPOILERS COLIN!

[colinr0380]

So that means you don't want me to expand on my current theory that the backseats of cars in Noé's films (or at least this and Enter The Void) are the areas for the most brutal (almost parodical) laying bare of character relationships?