Despite several instances of tastefully lit fellatio, a fraught interlude with a transgender prostitute, and a 3D image of a large penis’s sperm cascading towards the audience, Gaspar Noé’s Love proved to be the dumbest movie screened so far at Cannes—as well as the most soporific.
Critics are not immune to the allure of sexually provocative films, but it’s surely no accident that nearly every journalist I talked to after Love’s early Thursday morning screening, shown out of competition at a midnight premiere, admitted to dozing off at some point during the film. The impact of this year’s potential succés de scandale proved closer to Ambien than Viagra. Since Noé proclaimed that he hoped Love would “give guys erections and make girls wet,” and came with decidedly NSFW posters of ejaculating penises, the film can only be considered an abject failure.
In a preview article in The Telegraph, it was predicted that shocked moviegoers might storm out of Love during the midnight (12:15 a.m., to be precise) screening. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The young, chicly dressed crowd knew what it was in for—and was definitely in the mood for raunchiness as a festive atmosphere predominated before the movie unspooled at the Grand Theatre Lumière, Cannes’s largest venue. Instead of walkouts, Noé’s stab at an art house sex film was greeted with tepid applause as the final credits rolled.
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Love opens with an overhead shot of a couple’s rather affectless mutual masturbation. We eventually realize that the sexual athletes are Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American in Paris and an aspiring filmmaker who dreams of becoming the next Stanley Kubrick, and Electra (Aomi Muyock), his sexually voracious girlfriend. Trouble starts brewing when Murphy strays from Electra and becomes involved with a woman named Omi (Klara Kristin), who proves equally energetic in the sack. For a while, the film appears to be headed towards celebrating a joyous ménage à trois that will enable Murphy, Electra, and Omi to experience perpetual sexual bliss. But Omi’s pregnancy injects a bit of reality into the equation and Love, which unfolds in a nonlinear fashion consisting of interconnected flashbacks, becomes another cautionary tale about male hubris.
Wretchedly acted (the hunky Glusman is such a bad actor that he might actually have a future in bona fide porn) and clumsily written, the film only succeeds as an exercise in bottomless narcissism. The posters of Kubrick’s 2001 and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo that wend their way into Love’s widescreen compositions let us know that Noé considers himself the equal of these seminal directors. Since at least the 1970s, ambitious directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris), Nagisa Oshima (In The Realm of the Senses), and Lars von Trier (Nymphomaniac) have attempted to meld the conventions of the European and Asian art film with explicit erotic content. However you assess these films’ respective merits, none of them can be accused of falling prey to the cheap, ultimately juvenile gimmickry of Love.
