Love is a many-splendored thing. Not only is it the most sexually explicit film of the last decade (the characters speak more through their bodies than anything else), it’s also piercingly tender. In as much as Love is a conscious effort on the part of writer-director Gaspar Noé to assert his own fearless creative energy, it’s also an emotionally intense experience. The film’s tortured lead draws comparison to Goethe’s Werther, the famously Romantic protagonist who committed suicide over a thwarted crush. I like Werther and I like Love too. That is to say, I have a soft spot for sweeping, self-important romantic dramas.
They say love consists in looking outward in the same direction, and that’s exactly what Murphy and Electra are doing when we first see them. They’re also having sex, but the sex isn’t what’s interesting. Rather, it’s the way their bodies are positioned. It’s the sparse lighting. It’s the vacant look in their eyes. Love is an excessively erotic film but its nudity never comes at the expense of artistry.
Murphy is American actor Karl Glusman, well-cast for his competent, everyman look. He’s a film student living in Paris who worships 2001: A Space Odyssey and has Fritz Lang and D.W. Griffith posters on his walls. He’s also a stand-in for Noé himself. Indeed, the raw, hyper-sensitive quality of Love makes it Noé’s most personal. Electra is Aomi Muyock, a Swiss model whose questionable acting skills are forgiven in light of her commanding physical presence. These two actors give their all, and that includes having actual sex in front of Noé’s unrelenting camera.
On paper, Love is one of those films where “nothing happens.” Murphy wakes up with a pretty wife (Klara Kristin), a small child and an overpowering sense of exhaustion. He lies in bed, defeated, and wonders via voiceover, “How did I get here?” Through flashbacks, he recalls his affair with Electra, the impossibly beautiful woman with whom he had sex, ingested drugs and had more sex. In one of the film’s most eye-opening scenes, they have a threesome with their 17-year old neighbor (Kristin). It’s an amazing sequence, but the acme of their passion marks the beginning of their downfall.
While everyday moviegoers will be turned-off or even disturbed by the gratuity, Love is ripe for the art-house crowd. Noé’s intention was to capture “the organic dimension of being in love,” and he succeeds in many ways. Not unlike Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color, a similarly demanding film, Love is focused on a solitary figure’s reconciliation with the loss of love. Both mirror Dante’s words, “There is no greater pain/ than to remember, in our present grief, past happiness.”
The visual construction is bold, to say the least, and Noé pays unwavering attention to faces and bodies. The use of 3D, however, remains debatable. Noé claims it allows viewers a greater sense of identification, but I’m not convinced. This view may have more to do with a personal distaste for 3D, which seems gimmicky, even in cerebral fare. Cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers) deserves as much credit as Noé for his vibrant colors and electric light. The music, curated by Pascal Mayer, is an appropriately eclectic mix of Bach, Brian Eno and Pink Floyd.
In an entertainment landscape in which our collective ability to be surprised seems to be shrinking, Love manages to shock, and in some ways, awaken. It’s an unpredictable film, jumping through time, space and psychology with rampant energy. Though its content might be sex, it’s the emotions that linger, long after the 3D glasses are gone.
