How does a film like Love end up getting reviewed on a site like Brutal As Hell? When it’s directed by arch-provocateur and master of brutality Gaspar Noé. It’s fair to say from the outset, though, that Love is indeed a film about its title – this isn’t Noe in brutality mode. He’s said so himself, and really the only brutality in this film is the shitty way in which people treat each other sometimes – not with a vengeful fire extinguisher to the face, but with simple words and actions.
In Paris, January 1st, Murphy (Karl Glusman) lives with Omi (Klara Kristin) and their child. He’s woken that morning by a frantic phone call from his ex-girlfriend’s mother. As a result, Murphy plummets into a day indulging in the resentment of his present situation and the recollection of his tempestuous 2-year relationship with Electra (Aomi Muyock), who hasn’t been seen in months.
I’m a bit of a fan of Noé’s work, to say the least. When I first saw Irreversible it was on a big screen, it came complete with my lecturer’s warning that if anyone in the room thought they might get offended they should probably leave now – not because he wanted to give that warning, but because he’d received complaints in previous years using the film to teach. The big screen is precisely the place to see Noé’s film, so I’m sad that Love is the first I haven’t managed to see in a cinema, and particularly to have missed out on seeing the film in 3D.
I approached Love with a few reservations. Namely, the explicit sex scenes. Noé’s intention with Love was to make a film about young people and relationships and “transcending the ridiculous division that dictates that no normal film can contain overtly erotic scenes.” My reservations were right, I think, because certainly for the first half of the film – which is quite boring – all the sex scenes do, for me, is get in the way of the film progressing. But considering Noé is an aesthete, it’s not altogether surprising that he spends such a long time on these scenes. I found Enter the Void to be ‘boring’, too, but it felt a great deal more intentional in that film – via the hazy, drug-fuelled-then-dead perspective of its ‘lead’ character, Oscar. With Love, I was poised and ready to find myself with the first Gaspar Noé film that I didn’t like.
But something changed around half way into the film. There’s a particular scene, which features Noé as a secondary character, which is pure, visual provocation (over and above the scenes which precede it). If the earlier part of the film was Noé doing sentimentality, then I don’t think I’m interested. It’s when things start to fall apart that the filmmaking I enjoy returned to the fore. The sex scenes don’t go away, but they’re briefer, less integral and there’s a lot more of Noé’s own aestheticism on display, beyond his ability to shoot people really having sex.
Love is purest melodrama. Murphy and Electra’s relationship is filled with intense emotions and ultimate betrayals. It’s also an extremely vain story – Noé’s said how much of the film is based on the sorts of relationships he and his friends would have. Murphy is a navel-gazing student filmmaker and man-child who’s extremely difficult to sympathise with. His influences are the same as Noé’s – he expresses purest shock when Electra says she hasn’t seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and posters for Saló and Flesh for Frankenstein, among others, adorn the walls of his flat. Here is a filmmaker who’s always worn his influences writ large, and thanks to Murphy’s character that’s truer than ever in Love. The film is very much about Murphy, and when it reaches its unresolved ending, that becomes clearer still. Noé’s got a talent for making films about difficult protagonists, and even at Murphy’s most desperate point he’s a hard man to care for. Electra’s not much more compelling – she’s an archetypal attractive woman with undefined ‘issues’ – she’s not a million miles away from Paz de la Huerta’s Linda in Enter the Void (and Aomi Muyock even manages to out-histrionic de la Huerta in some scenes).
What keeps me involved in the film is the direction, which I don’t think will ever bore me, even if the stories seem to decreasingly involve me. If I can pin-point a difference between the films of Noé’s body of work that I obsess about the two I simply enjoy then it might be in the characters central to the films as much as the themes in the films themselves. Both Enter the Void and Love are about young people, while I Stand Alone and Irreversible are both films about people that bit older. The man-childishness of Murphy in Love is one of my biggest issues with the film, in some respects, but of course that’s what his character’s supposed to be. He lays blame at everyone’s feet except his own for the bad choices he makes. But – while the characters in Enter the Void and Love might be childish, there are echoes of their childishness in Vincent Cassel’s hot-headed Marcus and Phillippe Nahon’s hateful bigot Le Boucher. One of the most surprising things about Noé’s films is the extent to which they’re criticisms of toxic masculinity, and that’s no different in Love – an exploration of romance it might be, but that’s no guarantee of a happy ending.
The film bears so many of Noé’s trademarks – not only his plastering of walls with film posters, but his use of music, over-laid intertitles and editing are all present and correct. His use of Satie in the film is rather wonderful, and his use of well-known pieces of music, especially to film fans, are not without a sense of humour – see Goblin’s ‘School at Night’ play over a scene of a condom breaking and the subsequent unwanted pregnancy. That usual ‘blinking’ effect editing is here, but the pace of the overall film is much more languid, in-line with Enter the Void’s similar take. A lot from Enter the Void is present, in fact: Murphy’s voice-over, the shots from behind Murphy’s head, and indeed Murphy has the Love Hotel model in his room. I take that to mean that Love takes place in the same world as Enter the Void, and indeed it really seems impossible to me to talk about Love without placing it in relation to Noé’s other works.
For all the other influences he wears on his sleeve, his own work seems to be the biggest influence on Love. Noé’s spoken about how he conceived of the ideas for Irreversible, Enter the Void and Love at the same time, and that he had in fact wanted to make Love with Bellucci and Cassel, but their refusal to do the sex scenes led to Irreversible instead. There are many similarities to Irreversible in Love too – from locations, to the use of music, to the play with narrative time, to the frustrated central character. They’re extremely different films, though – Irreversible is the tighter, more energetic film, while Love is languid and takes its time. For me, Irreversible is the stronger film, but when they’re quite so different I think much of that is down to taste. There’s a reason I preferred the second half of Love, and that’s because the relationship between Murphy and Electra is breaking down, and with that the film’s style reflects the inherent anger there.
In another interview, Noé recalls his mother’s response when he told her he wanted to make Love: ‘No, you’re better at violence. You should do another violent movie.’ I think I agree, and while we get glimpses of that sort of energy in Love, inevitably that’s not what the film’s about. It’s a strange one. I’m not sure if I liked the film on its own merits, but as a part of the director’s body of work, I found it fascinating and compelling, and I want to watch it again – I don’t think that one viewing has quite scratched the surface of the film. There’s no doubting that Noé is a director who enjoys provoking his audience. There’s a scene in which he points directly at the camera and yells ‘piece of shit!’ – oh, how I wish to have seen that in 3D! – which comes from the sequence which for me, marks an improvement in the film. I don’t think that Noé disrespects his audience as much as that suggests, though, or at least not the sort of audience that appreciates where he comes from as an artist. Despite my fears, I don’t think that Love was a disappointment, but I hope that Noé goes back to something a bit more rage-filled for his next work.
Love is out now on DVD and Blu-ray from Artificial Eye.