Love (2015)

One of the most exciting filmmakers to emerge during the resurgence of boundary-pushing cinema in the 90's and early 2000's, Gaspar Noé is both celebrated and dismissed for his confrontational and provocative works like I Stand Alone (1998) and Irreversible (2002). Noé's films have become synonymous with many things, but if there's one descriptor that could accurately be attributed to each of his films, it would be “intimate”. Though referring to a visceral gut-punch like Irreversible as “intimate” will no doubt have some gasping in horror, intimacy is most commonly associated with closeness and that's exactly what Noé does, gets up close and extremely personal, often in unpleasant scenarios. I Stand Alone, Noé's first feature and companion to his earlier short film Carne (1991) earns the tag with the nearly non-stop interior monologue of The Butcher driving the film, something Noé would take even further in Enter the Void (2009) by literally going inside the head of it's main character Oscar, having the entire film play out in first person. Irreversible may focus on multiple characters, but Noé's presentation of a night out gone horribly wrong in reverse order is unflinching. Noé's third feature, Love, is perhaps his most intimate yet. Just as challenging as his other works albeit in a slightly different way, the film is also Noé's most underrated and one of the most accurate and affecting portrayals of a relationship gone wrong.

Murphy, an American filmmaker living in Paris with Omi, the mother of their young sun Gaspar, wakes on New Years morning to a voicemail from the mother of his ex-girlfriend Electra asking if he knows her whereabouts as she's been missing for months and was feeling suicidal prior to her disappearance. Having never gotten over his tumultuous split with Electra, caused by his impregnating of Omi who was their neighbor at the time, Murphy is extremely concerned about Electra's well-being and after taking some opium he'd been saving given to him by Electra, Murphy reflects back on his impassioned romance with Electra while lamenting his current life situation.

Considering what came before it, Love probably seems downright subdued and to a certain extent it is, with Noé trading visceral, physical violence for emotional turmoil and a much more calm filming technique following the hand-held mania of Irreversible and innovative acrobatics of Enter the Void, but it would be hard to mistake Love for the work of another filmmaker. Returning to the first-person narration of I Stand Alone, one of the most common criticisms of the film is Murphy's unlikability which is funny seeing as Noé has him repeatedly criticize himself during his voice-overs, referring to himself as a literal “dick” and owning up to his past mistakes which led to his current unhappiness. Noé is also once again playing with time, but rather than have the film play out in reverse like in Irreversible, Noé scrambles the entire timeline of Murphy and Electra's romance with an approach that is similar to Nicolas Roeg or Atom Egoyan. Much like Irreversible, this approach to time works in the films favor, giving the flashbacks to the happier moments between Murphy and Electra added weight and making the final moments of the film incredibly powerful. It's also appropriate that opium is is the catalyst for Murphy's flashbacks. Just like DMT was the influence behind Enter the Void's metaphysical head trip, Love plays out like an opium induced stream of regrets, very slow and ponderous with the scenes of the early stages of Murphy and Electra's romance representing blissful high with the inevitable crash being debilitating.

Much like Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013), Love was another film featuring unsimulated sex scenes not regulated to the adult marketplace and predictably that aspect of the film became the most talked about during it's per-release hype phase and after the fact. A bit surprising, seeing as Noé had used hardcore in the past with a scene in I Stand Alone featuring a clip of a hardcore adult film and Noé's short We Fuck Alone (2006) was part of the Destricted (2006) series of shorts which explored the seemingly eternal art/pornography question. Noé was also inspired to use Erik Satie on the soundtrack for Love by the use of Satie music in Stephen Sayadian and Francis Delia's Nightdreams (1981), a landmark adult film. One of the more unusual things regarding the film is Noé's choice to shoot the film in 3D, hence “Love 3D” moniker on some posters, which does seem a bit mischievous when the format had become cliché for mega-budget blockbusters, though one scene in particular really stands out and it's fairly obvious why Noé would shoot something like it in 3D. With the brilliant Climax (2018) added to his oeuvre, Love holds an interesting place in Noé's filmography and whether viewed in 2D or 3D, Love shows a slightly different side of Noé while still retaining his distinct personality and like all of Noé's films, will cause a strong reaction.