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"I'm inside my head," Murphy ( Karl Glusman ), a humorless young man in lust, says at one point in "Love," French provocateur Gaspar Noé's sexually-explicit drama about romance and, well, being inside your head. "Love" unsentimentally depicts Murphy's affair with Electra ( Aomi Muyock ) as a series of flashbacks, showing us all the information we need through the lens of Murphy's present-day emotions. But because Noé wants viewers to see Murphy's memories as a womb-like retreat, the first thing that impresses viewers about present-day Murphy is his petulance, expressed immediately through Glusman's flat, affect-less voiceover narration voice. Murphy may be concerned with his romantic feelings for Electra, but he's also a brat who blames his wife Omi ( Klara Kristin ) for his loveless marriage. "Love" is accordingly a prickly consideration of a past-tense sexual relationship from the perspective of a present-tense relationship that's well past its expiration date. Think of "Love" as a time travel movie, but about really sad young people you probably wouldn't want to hang out with in real life. 

In "Love," Murphy essentially relives a past life. He is not however in control of his emotions, so his memories are fragmented, and out of order. He recalls Electra because her mother calls him, giving him a sentimental oasis to cling to in order to escape his life with Omi. Still, in flashbacks, we see how Murphy's relationship with Omi ironically started because of Electra, and how Electra and Murphy's relationship was always a co-dependent one. He, a film student with posters of "Saló," and "Story of O" hanging ostentatiously on his bedroom wall, jealously obsesses over her. But eventually she, an aspiring painter, reveals that she's just as concerned with being protected. They form an unhealthy relationship that expresses itself through violent outbursts, and copious sex scenes that range from genuinely sexy to mechanically frantic. So while Electra accuses Murphy of being a bright young man who doesn't know what love is, she's just as impulsive.

Since Noé ("Enter the Void," " Irreversible ") wants to steep viewers in Murphy's confused emotions, the experience of watching "Love" can sometimes be more frustrating than thinking about the meaning of "Love" while you watch the film. In fact, "Love"  probably only works if you see it as a paradoxically over-determined work of and about sensuality. Noé uses 3-D photography but also never stops reminding viewers that they are outside of the frame, as he directly acknowledges in one scene where an erect penis thrusts directly at the camera before ejaculating CGI semen. You can't watch this movie and ever really forget that you're watching a movie, as is reinforced by the film's elliptically-structured plot, droning soundtrack and periodic mid-scene black-out cuts. That's because Murphy is, like some of Noé's previous blank slate heroes, a character who remembers himself at his most frustratingly vacant. 

Murphy thinks he knows it all, but is unfailingly clueless, as we see when he first meets Electra, and blurts out " What's the meaning of life? " and she quickly responds in kind: " Love. " Noé's movie is about characters who want to stay nestled in the past, as is evidenced by his frequent use of reddish-brown camera filters, and symmetrical frames-within-camera-frames compositions. "Love" is about an angry, sulking character who think he wants to make a "sentimental" romance featuring sex, but is ultimately incapable (and essentially uninterested) of seeing outside of himself. 

But what's it like to actually watch "Love"? This is a movie where non-professional actors and unsimulated sex scenes constantly encourage viewers to form a bond of alienation, instead of a bond of sympathy, with Murphy. That may sound pretentious, but Noé knows exactly the type of effect he wants to achieve, and he mostly gets it. His biggest gamble is the use of first-time actors to elicit complex emotions. But he builds a complex relationship between Murphy and his viewers throughout the movie, one that speaks louder than the unmoving, shrill line-readings from all three of the film's principle characters. 

The film's sex scenes are similarly mannered, mournful and distractingly graphic. But they're not just endurance tests, or frustrating slogs either. Noé wants you to see sex as a cocoon, so he genuinely tries to show you what attracts his young characters to each other. His earnest objectification of actors' bodies is, in that sense, often compelling. We look at bodies in motion, and see them as body parts first, and then people trying to get lost in each other, to give each other pleasure, and to remain lost in sensations that will always remain mysterious to anyone who isn't experiencing them first-hand. "Love" may not always be enjoyable, but it leaves an abiding mark.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

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Film credits.

Love (2015)

135 minutes

Aomi Muyock as Electra

Karl Glusman as Murphy

Klara Kristin as Omi

Juan Saavedra as Julio

Gaspar Noé as Noé - Art Gallery Owner (as Jean Couteau)

Vincent Maraval as Lieutenant Castel

Benoît Debie as Yuyo

Ugo Fox as Gaspar

Cinematographer

• Benoît Debie
• Denis Bedlow

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Review: ‘Love,’ Gaspar Noé’s Romance Told Through Sex

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

• Oct. 29, 2015

“Love,” the fourth, and easily the least unsettling, feature from the Argentine director Gaspar Noé , has but one goal: To tell the story of a romance entirely through sex. This ambition may be straightforward, but it is far from simple, as will become abundantly clear if you closely monitor your responses to its unsimulated explicitness.

You’ll have plenty of opportunity, as Mr. Noé gets down to business immediately with an interlude of mutual masturbation that introduces Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American film student living in Paris, and his lover, Electra (Aomi Muyock). (It also acquaints us with Murphy’s preening member, which has a starring role and a much livelier personality than its owner.) From there, we move back and forth in time and from one bed to another as the couple meet and bond, argue and copulate in a variety of configurations and with an assortment of partners.

Many of these squelchy encounters have a dreamy eroticism and a hazy beauty that owe less to the performers (though one threesome is like the naughtiest game of Twister ever) than to the significant skills of the cinematographer, Benoît Debie . Hovering above the dancing tongues and torsos, or sitting quietly alongside them, his camera calmly observes without resorting to tricks or distractions. This visual tranquillity, along with the characters’ heightened emotions, strips the film of salaciousness and highlights the only conversation it cares about: The one that runs from between the legs to between the ears.

In the context of a movie-rating culture that, in America at least, has deemed the orgasm more offensive than the Uzi, “Love” has a touching innocence that diverges radically from Mr. Noé’s back catalog. Lacking both the stylistic bling of his trippy 2010 feature, “Enter the Void,” and the shocking violence of “Irrevérsible” (2002), this latest venture casts the writer and director less as provocateur than as evangelist. His images hum with a melancholic nostalgia (remember pubic hair?), and his faith in the power of great sex — and a script that talks of little else — to support an almost two-and-a-quarter-hour feature is surprisingly sweet.

And ultimately misplaced. As if all its artistic energy had been gobbled up by the fornication, “Love” has nothing left with which to build its characters or set them in motion. A spider-web story unfolds in flashback as Murphy, now with a new partner (Klara Kristin) and an accidental toddler, learns that Electra has gone missing and spirals into bitter self-loathing. There’s a lot to loathe, as Mr. Glusman, an indifferent actor playing an unlikable jerk, mopes and rants in depressed voice-over. The picture might be filmed in unnecessary 3-D, but in every other respect, it’s exasperatingly one-dimensional.

Operating as a stand-in for his director — whose name graces two of the movie’s characters, whose face appears briefly as Electra’s former lover and whose penis has its own cameo — Murphy, like the women he pleasures, is a cipher.

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Cannes Film Review: ‘Love’

Who would have thought that this sexually explicit 3D opus would ultimately prove to be Noe’s tamest film?

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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The cast holds nothing back in Gaspar Noe ’s “ Love ,” but it’s the ever-provocative writer-director who exposes the most in his sexually explicit, semi-autobiographical Cannes scandal-in-the-making, a courageously personal account of an aspiring filmmaker torn between the mother of his child and the one that got away. The helmer of such transgressive pics as “Irreversible” and “Enter the Void,” Noe resolved to make a relationship movie that was honest about human sexuality, and though the stereoscopic 3D result thrusts plenty of the old bump-and-grind in audiences’ faces, it would be disingenuous to pretend that other directors haven’t gotten there first — and to more revealing effect. Still, you’ve gotta hand it to Noe for leaving no taboo unturned, and for putting so much of himself into a film that’s bound to leave titillation seekers resenting its creator during the long stretches of wallowing introspection between climaxes.

Given the escalating ambition of Noe’s oeuvre and the pornographic promo materials teased in advance of the pic’s Cannes premiere, who would have thought that “Love” would ultimately prove to be Noe’s tamest film? Like last year’s “Nymphomaniac,” this shocker is bound to test tolerance levels in every market it enters, further eroding the lingering Puritanism that exists toward onscreen depictions of passion. And yet, explicit (and evidently unsimulated) content aside, “Love” boasts a relatively soft core. Rather than coyly sidestepping the physical expression of its titular emotion, as so many films do, this one daringly explores the emotional foundation of coital acts, thereby fulfilling the lead character’s ambition of making “a movie that truly depicts sentimental sexuality.”

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Whereas more than a century’s worth of cinematic romances have delayed onscreen couples’ chance to consummate their attraction — whether via innocent kiss on the cheek or vigorous fireside sex atop a bearskin rug — Noe defuses the suspense by opening with American film buff Murphy (Karl Glusman) and aspiring French artist Electra (Aomi Muyock) manipulating one another in bed. Using only their hands, the naked couple tease each other to completion in a scene we’re meant to interpret as clear evidence of their sexual compatibility. Strange, then, that the very next scene shows Murphy waking up beside a completely different woman, blonde-haired Omi (Klara Kristin), while his son cries in the other room.

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It is New Year’s Day in Paris, a time to re-evaluate one’s life and priorities, and a voicemail from Electra’s worried mother suggests that her daughter may have committed suicide. Two years have passed since Electra found the nerve to dump Murphy (whose eponymous law, emblazoned in big block letters across a red screen, dictates, “If anything can go wrong, it will”). More aggressively fragmented than Noe’s notorious chronology-flipping “Irreversible,” yet far calmer in terms of Steadicam-style lensing, “Love” builds to a comparable fantasy of how things might have turned out differently.

But first, it has to establish how the relationship with Electra unraveled, leaping back in time to show Murphy cheating on her with Omi. The condom breaks (the camera helpfully reveals Glusman’s still-tumescent member for the benefit of those upon whom the concept is lost), and a mere jump cut later, Omi is breaking the ominous news that she’s with child. Murphy takes the information badly, though it’s much harder on Electra, whom Noe clearly adores, mistaking her sex appeal for sufficient cause that audiences might love her, too.

At best, Electra becomes an object of lust, betrayed by the very neighbor she suggested that they invite to a threesome. Whereas the one-on-one sex pairs the missionary position with old-fashioned romantic music, the hot-and-heavy session between Murphy, Electra and Omi inspires electric guitars and more adventurous framing: Horizontally entwined, the three lovers fill the widescreen frame, enjoying porn-star sex without the tacky XXX cliches. Noe shoots from above, maintaining an elegant distance, while sparing audiences the garish angles and gratuitous closeups of so-called “adult” fare. This menage a trois may not be “love,” but it’s something beautiful in Noe’s eyes — an explicit marathon, not unlike the sexual initiation scene in “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” but less incongruous with the highly stylized dramatic footage that surrounds it.

For this one blissful scene, Murphy manages to enjoy both women, but from then on, he must cope with the consequences of infidelity. Although the sequence of flashbacks is a jumble, Noe has carefully coordinated and timed how they will unspool in the film, locking himself into a certain pace (overlong at 135 minutes), the way Alejandro G. Inarritu did with “Birdman.” Here, instead of appearing seamless, the shots have been choreographed in such a way that Murphy’s position within the frame remains constant across the cuts — many of which work more like eye-blinks, snapping to black for a split-second either within or between the given shots.

In “Enter the Void,” Noe experimented with direct subjectivity, peering through the characters’ eyes. Here, he tends to stare at Murphy head-on, or else to study the back of his head, counting on 3D to amplify our sense of identification. The trouble is, we don’t actually share Murphy’s feelings. Though undeniably endowed with other assets, Glusman is not a good actor, nor a particularly compelling screen presence — and Muyock even less so (in some scenes, it’s actually hard to distinguish between Electra and two other brunettes Murphy shags along the way).

An American in Paris, Murphy is constantly surrounded by heavy accents, whose difficulties with English impede their line readings, which will surely inspire snarky types to dismiss the acting as being no better than porn performances — and yet, this is not pornography. Noe didn’t set out to arouse; rather, he intends to stress how sex is a vital aspect of the way humans connect (joining a crusade to demystify sex onscreen by such artists as Andy Warhol, Lars von Trier, Catherine Breillat and John Cameron Mitchell). Neuter these scenes of their prurient function, however, and they’re no more engaging than watching someone play a videogame.

By focusing on the relatively banal rift between Murphy and Electra, Noe risks making the sex boring — which might explain why he resorts to gimmick shots (including a 3D-enhanced view of that in-utero eruption seen in “Enter the Void”) and a dark descent into sexual experimentation. Though it’s not clear where in their relationship these boundary-challenging encounters occur, Murphy finds himself exploring a Paris swingers club (somewhere between “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy and a Francis Bacon painting) and a second threesome, this time with a transsexual prostitute — both lighter versions of encounters that came drenched in homophobia in “Irreversible.”

Whereas Noe over-amplified his own sex- and violence-related fantasies in his three previous features (beginning with the bloody “I Stand Alone”), here, the helmer strips away such hyperbole to reveal his naked soul. Barely disguised beneath a bad wig and anagrammatic pseudonym (Aron Pages), Noe appears as his own rival, a sleazy Paris art dealer named “Noe” (while Wild Bunch patron Vincent Maraval gamely plays a kinky cop who aptly admits, “I like watching”). Meanwhile, Murphy has a way of spouting the pic’s own intentions, satirically doing so in the most unsophisticated way, surrounded by posters for the most controversial films in the history of cinema — “Salo,” “The Birth of a Nation,” “Taxi Driver” — from an apartment lit like the hotel room in “Vertigo” where Jimmy Stewart fetishistically re-creates Kim Novak in the image of the woman who couldn’t save.

With overt references to past drug use, “Love” clearly functions as a sincere mea culpa to lover(s) Noe may have wronged along the way. Though extremely precise in its every composition, it feels less Kubrickian than the director’s other work. Surprisingly, Noe seems to be channeling Terrence Malick for a change, offering up an atheistic (and X-rated) twist on “To the Wonder,” with its hovering camera, gobbledygooky narration and melancholy choice between two women, neither of whom he deserves.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Midnight), May 21, 2015. Running time: 135 MIN.

• Production: (France) A Les Cinemas de la Zone, Rectangle Prods., Wild Bunch, RT Features, in association with Scope Pictures, with the participation of Canal Plus and the support of CNC. (International sales: Wild Bunch, Paris.) Produced by Gaspar Noe, Edouard Weil, Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua, Rodrigo Teixeira, Genevieve Lemal.
• Crew: Directed, written by Gaspar Noe. Camera (color, 3D), Benoit Debie; editors, Noe, Denis Bedlow; production designer, Samantha Benne; sound, Ken Yasimoto.
• With: Karl Glusman, Aomi Muyock, Klara Kristin, Juan Saavedra, Aron Pages, Vincent Maraval. (English dialogue)

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Love (II) (2015)

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Directed by Gaspar Noé

Murphy is an American living in Paris who enters a highly sexually and emotionally charged relationship with the unstable Electra. Unaware of the seismic effect it will have on their relationship, they invite their pretty neighbor into their bed.

Karl Glusman Aomi Muyock Klara Kristin Ugo Fox Juan Saavedra Gaspar Noé Isabelle Nicou Benoît Debie Vincent Maraval Déborah Révy Xamira Zuloaga Stella Rocha Omaima S. Nikita Bellucci Angell Summers Ian Scott Anna Polina Kelly Pix Phil Holliday

Director Director

Producers producers.

Vincent Maraval Geneviève Lemal Rodrigo Teixeira Édouard Weil Gaspar Noé Brahim Chioua

Writer Writer

Casting casting.

Eugenie Lavieille

Editors Editors

Gaspar Noé Denis Bedlow

Cinematography Cinematography

Benoît Debie

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Lourenço Sant'Anna Sophie Mas

Production Design Production Design

Samantha Benne

Art Direction Art Direction

Virginie Verdeaux

Sound Sound

Ken Yasumoto

Makeup Makeup

David Scherer

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Wild Bunch Les Cinémas de la Zone RT Features Rectangle Productions SCOPE Pictures

Belgium France

Releases by Date

20 may 2015, 06 jul 2015, 15 jul 2015, 16 jul 2015, 30 jul 2015, 31 jul 2015, 27 aug 2015, 28 aug 2015, 12 oct 2015, 22 oct 2015, 30 oct 2015, 26 nov 2015, 17 dec 2015, 15 jan 2016, 05 feb 2016, 12 feb 2016, 01 apr 2016, 09 jun 2016, 02 nov 2017, 20 nov 2015, 03 oct 2019, 11 jan 2016, releases by country.

• Theatrical R 18+
• Theatrical 15
• Premiere 18 Festival de Cannes
• Theatrical 18 Sortie Nationale
• Theatrical 18
• Theatrical 18 3D
• Theatrical R18+
• Theatrical N-18
• Digital D Casa CANÍBAL

Netherlands

• Theatrical 16

New Zealand

• Theatrical R18
• Theatrical M/18

South Korea

Switzerland.

• Physical 18 DVD \ Blu Ray Release
• Theatrical NC-17

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Popular reviews

Review by witch ★★★ 46

“A dick only has one purpose- to fuck...”

WHAT ABOUT PEE??? Don’t you PEE out of your dick??? 

You can survive without fucking, but you CANNOT SURVIVE WITHOUT PEEING.

Review by Karsten ★★★★ 19

If there's any filmmaker out there who has the vision and confidence to make the next 2001, it's Gaspar Noé. Hate him all you want, I sure as hell do sometimes (refer to my Irreversible review) but he's unarguably one of the most exciting filmmakers...ever? Yeah, ever.

I hate how this is getting labeled as just porn. The excessive amounts of sex is not the flaw of this film. The sex, if anything, tells the emotional arc of this shitty dude in a really interesting and clever way. If you're gonna make a film that tackles this idea and how it impacts someone psychologically, you're gonna have a lot of sex in the movie. That's just how it's gonna be.…

Review by Kristen S. Hé 何盛皓 ★★½ 7

more like Straight White Male Self-Pity 3D

Review by Eric Henderson ★★½ 2

A bit monotonous, a bit too long, sporadically intense, and I fell asleep multiple times. Just like actual sex.

Review by Eli Hayes 22

Gaspar Noé’s Love is anything but pornography. Pornography makes no attempt to delve into the psychology of the humans portrayed within; it contains actors as models, rather than actors as characters with any sort of depth. While Murphy (Karl Glusman), Elektra (Aomi Muyock) and Omi (Klara Kristin), the three chief characters, may not be the most complex individuals you’ll come across in the cinema this year, they still have hopes and dreams and aspirations, and undoubtedly transcend the notion of “the pornographic model” by a long shot.

Love has such a loosely constructed narrative that it’s difficult to summarize, but it essentially examines the mind and memories of its American protagonist, Murphy, now married and with a child, as he…

Review by aaron ★★★½ 6

me: watched for the plot the plot: karl glusmans dick

Review by James Healey ★★★ 12

Congrats to Gaspar Noe for getting Cannes to accept pornography into the festival finally.

Review by hunter strawberry

i'm still scratching jizz out of my hair after seeing it in 3D

Review by Simon Ramshaw ★★★½ 12

Review by carolina ★ 6

i didn't exactly watch this movie but i did watch "Love 2015 Movie. Only Sex Scenes." on xvideos which is pretty much the same, i believe. my vagina liked it but i did not

Review by san ★★★ 2

gaspar noé during that one scene : alright, kids! it’s time to put on your 3D glasses!!!

Review by matt lynch ★★ 7

A pretty hack novelty. Not to get all manifesto-y here but the idea that unsimulated sex is something that's provocative in "real" movies is totally bullshit. I've seen plenty of artful straight-up hardcore porn films, and most of them are 40 years old. Watch one of those.

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A case for gaspar noé's heartbreaking erotic romance film, 'love'.

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I’ve read many reviews of Gaspar Noe’s recently US-released erotic drama film Love that have written the film off as pretentious and self-indulgent (not uncommon for American critics to review French filmmakers in such language). This is of course not completely inaccurate. Noé references himself in shockingly obvious fashion throughout the film: the film’s protagonist, film student Murphy (played by Karl Glusman), is a clear stand-in for Noé himself. In the film, Murphy tells his French girlfriend Electra (played by Aomi Muyock) and another girl at a party that he wants to make cinema that portrays “authentic human sexuality” (the aim of Love itself, but I’ll get to that in a second). Murphy tells his girlfriend that he wants to name his son Gaspar. Hell, Noé even appears in the film as a corny gallery owner that comes between Murphy and Elektra. So, yes it’s indulgent. But since when is it a problem for an auteur filmmaker to be indulgent? How about we sub out “indulgent” for “passionate.” Noé, known for the perversely head screwy and ultra-violent films like Enter the Void and Irreversible , totally breaks type in this movie. Peter DeBruge of Variety has called this Noé’s tamest film and though he otherwise fairly reviewed the film that statement reads as such an obvious sentiment it feels like he utterly missed the point of the film. Noé sought to make a romance film, and he succeeded. Of course a romance film is going to feel tame in comparison with a film about a drug dealer embarking on a spiritual journey after being killed while tripping on DMT ( Enter the Void ), or a film following Vincent Cassel out to avenge the brutal beating and rape of his beloved ( Irréversible ), or one about a violent and pedophiliac butcher set as the film’s protagonist ( I Stand Alone ). Noé wanted Love to be a relatable film, and to do so set it in a Paris drug and art scene that he is familiar with. That familiarity allowed him to tap into a sentiment more universally relatable than any of his previous films. You need not know this Paris underground where the film transpires to feel the devastation of the relationship that defines this movie.

Gaspar Noé (second from left) with the cast of 'Love' at the Cannes Film Festival, image via ... [+] thefilmstage.com

DeBruge actually went on to label Love  derivative. Derivative of what? Other great erotic films; I’m thinking Last Tango in Paris , Nymphomaniac Part 1 , Shame , Crash (the David Cronenberg film and NOT the Paul Haggis film disastrously awarded an Oscar); have all portrayed sex as a distraction, a problem, or an addiction. Love is one of the first films to portray human sexuality and romance in a real way. Murphy and Elektra’s doomed relationship resonates profoundly with anyone who has loved someone so much that the very act of loving hurts. To love someone so strongly that against all odds of rationality you continue loving that person. This film made me re-live those feelings, those powerful and disorienting feelings. Perhaps that is why detractors of the film are having difficulty with it. It really resonates and it can be uncomfortable in how much it resonates.

I have seen this film twice so far; once in the theater in 3D and then I rented the film on Amazon to re-watch. Watching in 3D, it’s difficult to not be immediately taken with Noé’s remarkable technical prowess. The film’s most talked about scene, a nine-minute threesome scored to the duration of Funkadelic’s psychedelic landmark song 'Maggot Brain,' is astounding. In vibrant hues of red contrasted with the darkness of the room, it’s utterly transfixing. It’s sex. It is not the overly glamorized and romanticized sex of Hollywood cinema. And it’s certainly not the passionless and loveless sex of pornography. It’s real sex, with all three actors seemingly enjoying the turn of events. The camera starts close up on the actors’ heads but upside down, and then begins swirling around the lovers’ bodies capturing the whole sequence in comparatively precise detail. If released as a short film, the scene might warrant discussion in and of itself. Perhaps it’s a gratuitous exploitation of the female body, callously portraying a young dude having the time of his life. Or, maybe it’s a gloriously shot moment intimately portraying the sexual exploration of the three young people. I’m going to side with the latter, because I did not find any of the sex in this film to be gratuitous. The film is about two hopelessly in love people. They have tender sex, they have angry makeup sex, and they have sex with others in moments of weakness and/or arrogance. Is this not how sex actually is? One could argue that the 3D rendered male ejaculations are pure provocation on the part of Noé, and I could agree with that. But wouldn’t it be strange in some sense to try and really show human sexuality without fairly depicting the innate grossness that can come with it?

So, Noé most certainly gets to show off chops in this film. But what is disappointing to me is that the camera work, use of 3D, and rawness of the sex scenes have overtaken the conversation surrounding the film. I understand peoples’ gripes with Noé. He seems to be the brunt of derision similar to that suffered by artists like Matthew Barney. The artists that certainly reach for high aspirations but carry a public persona that opens them wide up to criticism. But what Noé also has in common with Barney is risk taking. He really does whatever he wants at all costs. The very fact that Love got financed is astounding, especially after Enter the Void performed dismally at the box office. But he did it, and in my opinion he delivered one of the most powerful romance films of contemporary culture.

We know immediately that Murphy and Elektra’s relationship is doomed. We know this because Murphy now has a child with Omi, the third woman in the threesome (Klara Kristin), but we also know this from the very first scene that shows Murphy and Elektra in bed. The camera pulls back slowly and combined with the score it all seems to indicate that this bliss cannot last. The film begins with Murphy hung-over as we listen to his thoughts as he expresses discontent over his relationship and situation, except for his clear love for his son. He has one regret: he never made a baby with Elektra. His anxiety is jettisoned by a voicemail from Elektra’s mother who hasn’t spoken to her daughter in months and is rightfully worried. We then find out the story of Elektra and Murphy through flashbacks.

Love taps into that most relatable of emotion: hopeless, senseless love. Murphy and Elektra’s relationship is portrayed as co-dependent and toxic, but never was there a moment where I didn’t completely empathize with the lovers’ inabilities to break free from one another. The performances aren’t showy but they are effective. Despite the three leads all being inexperienced actors, never do the performances feel like amateur hour. Glusman and Muyock have remarkable chemistry with one another. Not just in sex sequences either, their conversations while strolling through Paris feel so close to the way I speak with long-term girlfriends: that deep comfort that can only be achieved through intimacy. So many of us have a person that we will love despite all the hurt, betrayal, and even time apart that has transpired between us and that person. There are few moments I’ve witnessed in all of cinema sadder than when Murphy takes opium so he can be “close” to Elektra; the desperation in that. The romance at the heart of Love  is heartbreaking, toxic, dangerous, and utterly relatable. It almost feels as if all the technical flashiness of the film is Noé daring the viewer to find his/herself distracted enough to not feel the heartbreak that defines the film. He’s challenging you to not feel something. Arrogant? Yes. Bold? Absolutely.

In a conversation with (speak of the devil) Barney published by BOMB Magazine in 2014, Noé discussed the production of Love and claimed that he has no interest in a “coming-of-age” film because those films over-dramatize things of little importance. “Mostly the real passion comes after that,” he says. “When boys and girls are nineteen or twenty and want to try everything and get lost in all the temptations.” But Noé does seem to have a fascination with birth (I mean, Murphy in the film wants his baby to be named Gaspar), and more specifically, re-birth. Love can be interpreted in this lens, and in that sense, shares thematic connections to Enter the Void . In Enter the Void , the protagonist travels through the space-time continuum to find redemption and be re-born as his sister’s baby (shown in extremely explicit detail, of course). In this film, Elektra and Murphy need to be broken down and destroyed by their love for one another to find solace and live out the rest of their lives. The final shot finds Murphy, allowing himself to weep, holding his baby son and talking to Elektra through the child. He is sorry. And even though he will most likely never be able to move on from Elektra, he will be able to live and he might even allow himself to love. It's intriguing that Love, while objectively voyeuristic, never feels voyeuristic. It doesn't feel like you are watching a couple go through the motions, instead it becomes very easy to feel like you are watching your own life experiences. Whatever your problems are with this film (and again, I understand where they are coming from), I find it hard to believe that a movie that feels this intensely failed to move you. But then again, maybe you just haven’t met your Elektra. I wager that you probably will, and that Love will make ever so much more sense to you then.

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A 'sexual melodrama' from French provocateur Gaspar Noé ('Irreversible', 'Enter the Void').

Time Out says

It promises all sorts of muck, and muck it delivers. ‘Love’ is a 3D sex film from Gaspar Noé, the French provocateur behind ‘Irreversible’ (violence, rape) and ‘Enter the Void’ (drugs, prostitution). It’s filthy and has many of the foibles of porn – bad dialogue, can-I-borrow-some-sugar plotting – but Noé holds back from showing hardcore penetration, although it’s hard to imagine his cast aren’t actually having full-on sex here. In the end, ‘Love’ is more silly than sordid, and even a little soppy in its late – too late – love-filled moments. Many teens will love it; most adults will roll their eyes.

It opens with Murphy (Karl Glusman, suicidally game), an American sort-of-film-student in Paris getting a handjob from his girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock, not the world’s greatest actress). But it then emerges that these two have split, and Murphy, fatter and with a moustache, is now unhappily living with ex neighbour Omi (Klara Kristin) and their toddler. The demise of Murphy and Electra’s relationship, via orgies, drugs, betrayal and lots and lots and lots of sex, is then revealed backwards as in Noé’s ‘Irreversible’. But time hops about much more here, so that what we get is more like a Paris-set, much raunchier and aggressive ‘Blue Valentine’ with murky visuals, frank sex and, of course, a centrepiece money shot that makes the very most of 3D (think about it).

You can’t totally dismiss Noé as an empty showman. He knows how to create and run with a base, nocturnal, queasily descending atmosphere like few filmmakers, and he’s alive to our self-destructive ability to screw up our own destinies. And there are some strong non-sex moments, too, especially two long, back-to-back scenes of Murphy and Electra walking and talking, once at the start of their romance and once towards the end.

But Noé fatally undermines any serious purpose with tongue-in-cheek scenes featuring himself (in a wig) as Electra’s older ex-boyfriend. Also, the film’s flagrantly autobiographical elements (Murphy, like Noé, says he want to make films full of sex, violence and spunk) are distracting and self-regarding. There’s a semi-decent, bold film buried somewhere here, but it’s nearly sunk by its need to shock and tease at almost every turn.

Release Details

• Release date: Friday 20 November 2015
• Duration: 135 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Gaspar Noé
• Screenwriter: Gaspar Noé
• Aomi Muyock
• Karl Glusman
• Klara Kristin

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Review: love.

One’s proximity to the screen doesn’t alter the significance of Gaspar Noé’s film as the cine-equivalent of clickbait.

Richard Brody once wrote that he prefers to sit in the front row at the movies because “sitting up close makes the complexity and diversity of each image a physical reality.” I relate to his compulsion, but Brody’s logic presupposes that all images are created equal—that they’re all inherently complex. In terms of intricacy, for example, Alex Ross Perry’s virtuosity as a filmmaker is as varied as Gaspar Noé’s is one-note. Watch Queen of Earth in the front row and its sensually abstract charting of the boundaries of perception may feel so dense as to seem dangerous to even ponder. Conversely, Noé’s films seek to impact the consciousness with such literal and antagonistic modes of articulation as to actively impede contemplation.

To be fair, the enfant terrible seems aware of his brand of cinema as a kind of virtual repellent, and with his new film, Love , he metatextually literalizes his desire to fuck with audiences with a shot of an erect cock splooging directly at the camera. That the film is intended to be projected in 3D, meaning that you, like me, may opt to witness this cumshot far from the theater’s front row, is ultimately beside the point, as one’s proximity to the screen doesn’t alter Love ’s significance as the cine-equivalent of clickbait.

If Enter the Void ’s at once dazzling and exhausting synthesizing of image and sound worked to convey its main character’s perpetual sense of living outside his own body, Love attempts an inverse. In the film’s opening scene, Murphy (Karl Glusman), wakes up and announces, via voiceover, “I wish I didn’t exist right now.” His ex-girlfriend and love of his life, Electra (Aomi Muyock), has gone missing, and the news knocks him into a state of discombobulation that perfectly aligns with the film’s artfully comatose style.

Murphy says he’s stuck inside his head, and the audience’s own sense of being in the vicariously conjured confines of his boxed-in existence is amplified by Noé’s compositions: As Murphy is often framed within doorways, the film’s 2.35:1 aspect ratio feels in constant threat of collapsing upon itself. Because its cuts to black are so abundant and its graphic matches work to erode any sense of time, Love evokes a slipstream illuminated onto the screen by a slide projector. As such, the willfully torturous experience of watching the film can be likened to sifting through a friend’s vacation pictures—an act that often necessitates surrendering one’s sense of will.

Love also suggests the perverse, almost comical, flipside of Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. Electra and Murphy, as well as Omi (Klara Kristin), the woman he’s living with at the start of the film and his child’s mother, are constrained by Noé’s predetermined vision of how people talk, fight, and fuck, only here the talk is stupid, the fighting violent, and the sex unsimulated. One could justify Love ’s jejeuneness, much of it supplied by Murphy’s soporific ramblings about such things as his fat, single-minded dick, his fear that his son will turn out gay, and women being not unlike C.I.A. agents, as an ideology of infatuation.

Noé, you could say, is trying to represent on screen his nostalgia for the greasy uninhibitedness of being young and having few cares in the world beyond fucking. But, then, there are too many signs pointing to the fact that the characters’ infatuations are simply Noé’s own, beginning with the Birth of a Nation and Salò posters on Murphy’s bedroom wall. This is narcissistic self-absorption writ large, and while Noé amusingly admits as much (as in the 2001 -loving Murphy wanting to name his child Gaspar), the lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker’s delayed adulthood.

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Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine . A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice , The Los Angeles Times , and other publications.

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Review: Bare

Tokyo International Film Festival 2015: Terminal and Three Love Stories

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Love (2015)

• Consequence

Film Review: Love

Directed by

• Aomi Muyock
• Karl Glusman
• Klara Kristin
• Juan Saavedra

Release Year

Note: This review was originally published back in September 2015 as part of our coverage for the Toronto International Film Festival .

Filmed in surprisingly effective and almost gimmick-free Scope 3D, Love is a romantic melodrama told in a dreamy, drugged-out nonlinear narrative. It begins at what hints at an ugly end: Murphy ( Karl Glusman ), a nihilistic American who lives with his less than beloved partner, Omi ( Klara Kristin ), and their son in Paris, receives a panicked message from the mother of his ex-girlfriend, Electra ( Aomi Muyock ). She hasn’t been able to reach her daughter for months and fears that something has happened to her.

Frustrated by his miserable life and worried about his former flame, Murphy indulges in an old stash of opium and a near fatal dose of nostalgia, and spends the rest of his day revisiting his emotionally and sexually-charged relationship with Electra. They meet, they wax philosophical on the nature of love and film, they fuck each other, they fuck other people, they fight, they fuck some more, they promise never to leave each other, and they become embroiled in a post-threesome love triangle with Omi, not necessarily in that order. All of this is explicitly explored with copious amounts of unsimulated sex.

The sex scenes, which have generated most of the film’s buzz since its Cannes premiere, are certainly a conversation starter if not quite a cinematic triumph. They begin in tepid fashion, with an ennui-ridden handjob and slowly build to the genuinely titillating (if oddly softcore, given the circumstances) threesome on which the film’s drama hinges, before devolving into tedium as both the story and Murphy and Electra’s penchant for hallway coitus drags on a bit too long. There’s a money shot that bears a striking resemblance to the ejaculating banana in The Kids in the Hall ’s “Roses” skit.

Despite the genitals involved, the film manages to push far fewer barriers than previous Noé offerings like 2009’s  Enter The Void , and 2002’s  Irreversible . Murphy attempts to have sex with a trans woman at one point, but he, predictably, can’t go through with it and the scene is, disappointingly, played more for laughs than anything remotely challenging to cinema’s trans issues.

The non-sex scenes are more uniformly mundane, alternating between borderline pretentious conversations, overwrought arguments, and Murphy’s navel-gazing voiceovers (for a man having so much partner and group sex, his internal monologue is awfully masturbatory.) Save for a few self-aware bursts of humor along the way – I won’t spoil what Murphy ends up naming his son, but it’s worth a smirk – Noé’s writing is undisciplined, to put it charitably. While more seasoned actors might have been able to temper his dialogue and shape it into something more human, Love ’s largely amateur actors, game as they are emotionally as well as physically, are not quite up to the task. Murphy and Electra’s screeching arguments, in particular, make for unfortunate viewing.

What Love lacks in substance, though, it almost makes up in style. The 3D is a thoroughly pleasant surprise, adding a subtle depth to the sex scenes and giving Noé’s saturated color palate a pop art punch. The soundtrack lends a seductive, swooning quality to the proceedings. Combined, they make for a satisfying sensory experience that almost manages to sustain the film’s 134 minute run time.

Like a questionable one night stand, though, the Love viewing experience is entirely dependent upon well-managed expectations. Get in, let your senses be overwhelmed for a little while, don’t invest any emotional or intellectual energy in the experience, and then move on. And it’s probably best never to think of it again.

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Movie Reviews

Love (2015)

I went, well let me rephrase, at the last minute a friend had an extra ticket to this movie and so I went expecting to basically be affronted by a faux-artsy film filled with gratuitous porn for two hours. While the film was a bit too long and repeated the same theme over and over of stupid people hurting each other as you watch a relationship spiral downwards, it remains amusing and has enough of a story to be considered a… story. The movie includes a slew of artsy fartsy filmic devices, such as a few black frames placed here and there as if to keep you alert and remind you you’re watching a film, or add to the voyeurism that you are watching in on the lives of others and perhaps the camera occasionally blinks to emulate your eye, literally taking hold of Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of An Eye,” by not cutting necessarily where you would blink, but straight up showing you when you blink… whether that was the intention or not, at least was thought-provoking on some level, albeit distracting. Maybe this has been done before, but I hadn’t seen it. While it’s a bit of a contradiction to say the editing of this film was probably my favorite part, while also saying that the film was too long, makes no logical sense, but yeah, despite the film being too long the editorial conventions and match cuts were the most interesting to me. Of course, the sex scenes go too far in the movie and are overkill, but sometimes they do actually add a stronger sense of intimacy to the story that wouldn’t otherwise exist between two okay-actors playing art students. The film should probably be called ‘sex’ and not ‘love’ because that is clearly what is driving the film. I may not go around advertising for people to see this, but it can at least be expected to be a bit classier than just sexploitation.

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