Love (Gaspar Noe)

Out nowish (well, tomorrow properly after yesterday's previews).

It's taken half a decade for Gaspar Noe to make a follow up to Enter the Void, but here it is, and it's ****ing infuriating.

This is both a typical and atypical Noe film. A reasonably traditional - albeit entirely non-chronological - romance does feature many of Noe's trademarks - hollow intellectualism, a strong visual signature, an asshole young American protagonist surrounded by beautiful women, and of course plenty of censor-baiting material.

For the first half of the film or so, it works well. It's a more pared down film, but benefits from a very intimate focus. The acting is utterly appalling, but a dreamy mood - fragmented memories taking on an almost surreal quality, casually scored to an interesting variety of pop, classical and experimental music - gets across a reasonably potent sense of romantic longing. The sex, explicit though it is, is reasonably well handled - shot in a way that actually fits with the film's mood and aesthetic, unlike say Blue is the Warmest Colour (a film similar in many ways, but does almost everything else substantially better). It is, simply, sexy, which I guess is exactly what it's trying to be.

Unfortunately, as the film continues on, one begins to realise there's not a whole lot going on here. Perhaps most surprisingly is the visual tedium. Enter the Void, for all its glaring flaws, was a masterclass in cinematography, one of the most radically shot films of recent times. There's fleeting glimpses of Benoît Debie's incredible abilities here, but for the most part the film adopts a single visual theme - shooting pretty much the entire film in very exact medium close ups, in what David Bordwell has dubbed planimetric framing (ala Wes Anderson). Problem is, it gets old fast. Like BitWC, the intention is obviously to get up close and personal with the characters, but this lacks the dynamism of that film's camerawork and instead feels like a weird academic exercise in the rule of thirds or something. It merely grows more tedious as the film progresses, making very little use of the film's 3D presentation (yes, there is a 3D money shot, because what were you expecting?)

The film's narrative too descends into tedium over the course of its running time. The pondering over romance and relationships is barely adolescent at times, and bears little resemblance to how real people act (like a dishonest attempt at emotional honesty). The very lacking acting helps little. The protagonist - named Murphy, seemingly so-called in order to flash a neon intertitle describing Murphy's Law on screen at one point - is a thoroughly unpleasant person to spend time with. He's shallow, cruel, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic (in one particularly misjudged scene), and gives no sense whatsoever that he knows anything whatsoever about the cinema classics he keeps gushing about (posters on the wall do not equal cine-literacy). The women don't even have characters of their own, really.

Repugnant individuals are by no means a fast-track to a film's ultimate failure - there's even the argument the shallowness here is exactly the point. But the fundamental problem here is that it has nothing interesting to say about them. Perhaps Noe is trying to articulate something about himself - in one farcically self-aware moment, two main characters discuss why they should call their child 'Gaspar' (justifying audience laughs only equalled by the 3D ejaculate later on - intentional or not is a matter of debate). What that 'something' is, who the hell knows other than the man himself? The warts-and-all portrayal of an intensely passionate relationship - from beginnings to its hateful collapse - would perhaps be more effective if it didn't feel like we've been through it so many times before (BitWC again!). Like its characters, this is a film with very little of substance to say, but is intent on saying it very seriously indeed.

Love is a mess, then, but like all Gaspar Noe films it's a fascinating one at times. There are moments here that show a one-of-a-kind, ambitious director at work. There's also much bull****. Alas. Probably worth a watch nonetheless - it's still by far the artiest porn you'll see this year.