Gaspar Noé wants to shock you.
His first film, I Stand Alone, featured an isolated, incestuous butcher pummeling his lover’s pregnant belly in order to terminate his unborn child. The Cannes premiere of his follow-up, Irréversible, which features one of the most brutal and uncompromising rape sequences ever put to film, made over 200 audience members storm out in disgust, with several others fainting and requiring medical attention. It was later discovered that Noé had set the background noise of the film’s first half-hour to a frequency of 28 Hz—a low pitch said to induce nausea and vertigo. And Noé’s 2006 short We Fuck Alone, part of the erotic compilation Destricted, focused much of its attention on a man sodomizing a blow-up doll at gunpoint.
The 51-year-old Franco-Argentinean filmmaker also enjoys popping up in his films—literally. No, we’re not talking about a Where’s Waldo-esque Hitchcock drop-in or those tongue-in-cheek Stan Lee Marvel scenes. Far from it. In Irréversible, Noé did double-duty as one of several naked, masturbating men taunting his protagonist at a gay S&M club. And for his latest film, Love, he plays an art gallerist ex-boyfriend who, in a jarring dream sequence of sorts, flashes his erect penis.
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“Yes, it’s my penis,” he proudly declares. “I didn’t have a proper erection in [Irréversible], but here I do.”
With his shaved head, expressive eyes, and bushy mustache, Noé vaguely resembles a tinier, mellower version of Tom Hardy’s character in the film Bronson. And though he is a self-admitted provocateur, Noé’s cinematic mission is also a noble one: to liberate audiences from the backwards, MPAA-mandated notion that sex is “dirty.”
“People are ashamed of doing erotic images,” he says. “I don’t understand why you can show someone’s ears on Instagram and not someone’s genitals. There is no difference between the ears and the genitals. The whole Western system is far, far more conservative and castrated than people even know.”
Castrated? How so? “There are health excuses for circumcision, but the truth is if kids are circumcised or not, the rate of infection from sexual diseases is almost the same,” says Noé. “So it’s a patriarchal society where people want to control young men’s dicks. We live in a society that says you can do almost whatever you want, but at the same time we must control your genitals.”
The genital police would definitely take issue with Love.
Noé’s 3D film opens with the camera trained on two beautiful, naked bodies writhing in ecstasy on a bed. The woman, a sensuously-curved brunette, is stroking the man’s erect penis as he rubs her clitoris. For close to four minutes, we watch them moan and shriek, upping the intensity until the swelling orchestral music reaches a fever pitch and the man ejaculates. Welcome to Love.
Those two limber bodies belong to Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American film student, and Electra (Aomi Muyock), his Parisian lover. We soon learn that the two are exes, and Electra ran away when she discovered that Murphy had slept with her pal—and occasional threesome partner—Omi (Klara Kristin), and gotten her pregnant.Even though Murphy and Omi are a couple with a young son, he is unhappy, and still pines for his wild, crazy, and drug-filled days with Electra. When Murphy receives a frantic phone call from Electra’s mother informing him that she’s gone missing, he recalls their torrid, sex-fueled love affair.
And there is plenty of sex, including an acrobatic threesome between the three leads, plenty of oral copulation, and, in one scene that garnered a surfeit of ink at Cannes, a close-up shot of an erect penis ejaculating—with the shot of semen flying directly at your face, courtesy of 3D.
Though Noé has a reputation for devilish CGI trickery, including inserting a digital penis into the aforementioned rape sequence in Irréversible and, in that same film, employing some nifty rotoscope, matte, and editing techniques to effectively bash in a man’s skull with a fire extinguisher in what appears to be a continuous take, there wasn’t much in the way of CGI here. In Love, the sex scenes were unsimulated—unlike Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, wherein the Danish filmmaker had body doubles have sex, and then digitally superimposed Shia LaBeouf and his other movie star actors’ upper bodies onto the doubles, so the top half was the star, and the bottom half was the double.
“He protected the image of the actors and created such a strange game that, at the end, the actors were excited to see if it looked real,” says Noé. “But it was real footage made with body doubles, and what was bad about doing that was, yes, he ended up doing it with real actors, but all the press was about that.”
For Love, Noé first tried to go the movie star route, pitching the idea to then real-life couple Vincent Cassel and Monica Bellucci over 15 years ago. But the graphic sex proved too much for them, and they instead agreed to star in Irréversible.
So the filmmaker went rogue, employing a casting technique where he met people out at night in bars or clubs, chatted them up, and filmed them with his iPhone to see if they popped. It’s how he met Swiss model Muyock at a party and Kristin, a painter’s assistant, at a nightclub. He really lucked out with Glusman, a striking—yet little-known—New York theater actor who was recommended to him by a friend.
And no, in case you’re wondering, he didn’t require any of the actors to strip naked or have sex during their auditions, though he did conduct lengthy chemistry reads.
“For this movie, I needed people who were not only charismatic but also daring,” he says. “I don’t care if people have been studying acting before as long as they’re charismatic—the camera tells the truth. So you test people on camera and see if a couple is believable or not, see if they’re funny or not, and some people that are really pretty in life are not onscreen, and vice versa. Some people can seem almost sterile in real life, and once the camera is on them, they come to life.” That seems to be the case with Glusman, an impressive physical specimen who’s since booked roles in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams.
But the tender and erotic Love is about more than carnality—it’s also, like many of Noé’s works, a fascinating examination of time.
Irréversible, a rape-revenge saga shot in reverse chronological order, dealt with how one minor misstep could cause a ripple effect leading you (and your loved ones) down a dark path of despair, while his last film, 2009’s Enter the Void, was shot in first-person from the perspective of a disembodied ghost re-witnessing the events of his life that led to his grisly death. Similar to the previous two films, Love is about how the mistakes we make can haunt us for eternity.
“The movie’s melancholic because it’s about a passion that fails, and about how quickly you can lose the thing that you loved the most in life,” says Noé. “Accidents happen in life where everything can fall apart. Maybe for people that are religious they’ll attach a dirty word to this movie, because it’s their vision of hell, but for other people this type of behavior is normal.”
He adds, “I relate to this story, and when I was editing it together, it’s the first time in my life that I cried at these images I’d created. I thought it was so sad.”
And as for the sex, well, that’s important too.
“People are doing it in life,” says Noé. “If you portray a rape or a murder scene, you’re portraying something that most people haven’t experienced and don’t want to experience. But when you make a portrait of a complete sexual life between a boy and a girl, I think most people have been through it, so they’re not shocked by the images, they’re just shocked that it’s finally happening in a normal, regular theater.”
