LOVE
DVD. Curzon / Artificial Eye

I was surprisingly impressed by Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, an archetypal ‘difficult’ film that nevertheless seemed to have a sort of brilliance about it. Maybe it’s because I saw it in the cinema with just the right amount of beer inside me – enough to be slightly buzzing and so appreciative of the off-kilter warped reality of the film, but not enough to make me fall asleep.

I watched Love on DVD, stone cold sober, and perhaps that was my mistake.

God knows, I was pretty excited about this film. Noe shooting a hardcore movie, chipping furiously away at the division between mainstream and porn furiously – and in 3D no less? What couldn’t there be to enjoy? Well, everything as it turns out. Love is a mind-numbingly dull, spiritually empty and dismally self-indulgent affair that makes me think that I must’ve been more wasted than I thought to enjoy the superficially similar Enter the Void. Though I suspect that it was simply a much better film.

With Love, Noe seems to have been listening to his own fan club, which is never a good thing. Or maybe he’s just his own greatest fan, like several other directors we might name. Certainly, there’s a lot of vanity in this film – at one point, his American lead character explains how he always wanted to call a son Gaspar, a comment that made both myself and Mrs Strange Things laugh at loud at its ludicrous self-aggrandisement. There’s another character called Noe, and the director himself appears in the film as a love rival for the main character. It’s like watching someone masturbate while looking in the mirror, so in love with himself is Noe (the director, not the character).

All this would be fine if the film wasn’t so mind-numbingly dull. It feels a lot longer than its already excessive 135 minutes, as it slowly tells the story – in sort of reverse order, as per Irreversible – of a love triangle involving the dullest and most obnoxious people you could ever imagine.  Karl Glusman is Murphy, a narcissistic film student (cue lots of cult movie posters splattered across the walls – Noe seems to be as much a self-conscious film nerd as Tarantino. In fact, the best thing about this film is the soundtrack, culled in a Tarantino magpie style from various sources including John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and Pink Floyd’s The Wall) who is in a tempestuous relationship with Elektra (Aomi Muyock), a woman so utterly horrible that any sense of a doomed, tragic romance is scuppered by the viewer’s desire for her to get off the screen and stop screaming hysterically. He’s a complete dick who can’t keep it in his pants, she’s a neurotic coke fiend and both are unbearable.

They have the world’s dullest threesome with neighbour Omi (Klara Kristin), but Murphy then sneaks off for a one on one with the teenage neighbour and knocks her up – alienating Elektra and landing him with a son (Gaspar, of course!) and partner he doesn’t want. Meanwhile, Elektra has vanished, with the possibility that she has killed herself. All this is held together with Murphy’s monotone, self-pitying narration, something that could be used by the military to torture prisoners. He goes on… and on… and on… whining and moaning. It’s unbearably dull.

Now, I understand that Noe might have had his options limited when it came to casting a film that called for explicit, unsimulated sex. But believe me, there are actors making standard hardcore porn who could have brought more personality and dimension to these three roles. I’m sure the monotonous nature of the performances was a deliberate choice from the director, but they make for a tedious viewing experience.

As for the hardcore nature of the film – well, yes, there are several explicit sex scenes; not enough to qualify the film as actual porn, but long and graphic nonetheless. They are also staggeringly dull. I know it is the critical cliché to call sexy films boring in an effort to hide the fact that they turned you on, but the sex scenes here really are boring. For a film called Love – a film allegedly attempting to show ‘real’ love – these scenes are notably lacking in any sort of passion.  Apparently they were not choreographed, so I assume that everyone felt too self-conscious to do very much, but there is no sense of emotional connection between the characters. Then again, they seem equally lifeless in the other scenes too, so maybe that is the idea.

Regardless of the lack of passion, the sex scenes are graphic enough for it to be remiss of me not to once again point out the hypocrisy of the British censors in passing this film with an 18 rating, complete with hardcore penetration, blow jobs and cum shots, while consigning other films with no more explicit content to the R18 ghetto. Love does not have enough of a narrative to make it somehow more acceptable than a film like, say, The Opening of Misty Beethoven (a better written, acted and directed  - and more artistically valid - film than this) and to suggest that these scenes are somehow dangerous in a ‘sex work’ while acceptable here is utter nonsense. That this double standard continues is nothing short of a disgrace, and is an indictment of the way the BBFC are a law unto themselves.

Lars Von Trier showed that it is possible to make an enthralling, sprawling, explicit look at sex and desire in his masterful Nymphomaniac. Love, unfortunately is extremely hard work and offers no reward at the end. If you want to see explicit sex or studies of crumbling relationships, there are plenty of more rewarding options available. This simply leaves you with a headache, and that’s watching it ‘flat’. I dread to think how painful the 3D version must be.

DAVID FLINT

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