Open admission: I’m not a Noé fan. Never have been and after watching “Love,” the position still stands.
It’s a story through the eyes of a young, immature film student. So it’s permitted to be deeply shallow, meandering and excessive. I’ll give it that. If it were from the perspective of an older couple (like Haneke’s masterful “Amour”), it’d be a different story altogether. But it’s not. It’s young love, dumb love, and boring love. So if you don’t mind the “metafilm-from-film-student” theory, you’ll love “Love.”
Yes, Noé constantly reminds us we’re watching a film student’s perspective of film love. Whether it’s the whispery voiceovers lifted from Terrence Malick, the plastered film posters all over the characters’ walls (“Taxi Driver,” “M”, “Birth of a Nation” and even a sly “The Vanishing” poster in the police office) or the overuse of the overused Erik Satie score, Noé needs to re-affirm - as he always does - that we’re watching a Noé student film.
So what’s wrong with that? When Coppola made “Tetro,” he proclaimed it to be a return to his student film days when he first fell in love with cinema. And I’d argue, there’s a puerile and even exciting veracity to “Tetro.” With “Love,” that puerility is cute for the first thirty minutes and then graduates to nauseam and numbness.
Numbness for all the wrong reasons is what particularly put me off the film. There’s a sense that Noé doesn’t love any of this characters and doesn’t want them to find happiness or anything for that matter. They shuffle around miserably, finding only some joy in exchanging their fluids. I don’t mind not liking characters, but it’s beyond hating or loving any of them. It’s sheer indifference.
For a movie that relishes in its explosiveness of colours, sexuality and mistreatment of characters, I was shocked at how much I didn’t care.
But ultimately the pace and art of editing grabs me first when watching a film. “Love” seemed to have lacked either. It felt like it was about four hours long. I’m not sure if it was the technique of the “fading to black breathing” dissolves he employs, but it felt ceaseless. There was absolutely no pace. Gaspar Noé insists on editing all of his own films. And someone should really not let him do this. The construction is so faulty. He attempts to break structure and give us the common Sonata-structure, where it returns to where it started. But it fails. Again, this could be lent to the “film student” theory, but I’d argue the rest of his oeuvre suffers from this too.
So what’s good about “Love”? The visuals. Goddamn it. The cinematography is enlightened. It’s one of the best looking films of the year (maybe only next to “The Lobster”) . There’s a love for the image in his works and therefore, it feels even more tragic when he wastes about twenty minutes of the film with characters talking on the phone.
Remember how Hitchcock said “You should be able to understand a movie with no sound”? Yeah, this film would be indecipherable without sound. It’s a lot of Murphy, our lead, laying on a bed with narration or walking with his head turned to us, etc. But it all looks gorgeous. So kudos to Noé and his cinematographer.
The music and sound design are also top notch. The film’s soundscape is wonderful, captivating and disturbing. Great use of score. He reaffirms the meta-theory with the use of John Carpenter music (a filmmaker unabashedly using a filmmaker’s written composition).
There’s a scene where two Parisian authorities take the American Murphy for a pint and discuss the difference between French love and Western love. It’s the kind of stated thesis you might expect in a facebook status. It pokes holes in the American’s ideology surrounding fear in love. It’s a wonderful conversation, albeit contrived and painfully direct. And perhaps that’s the point? Or is it that the American’s obsession with violence is as blasé as the French’s obsession with love?
I don’t know. I was so numb to the poor writing at this point that I kinda turned off. Wait… maybe that’s the point? That with all the graphic sex and cum in the face, love is a turn off? Again, I have no idea.
There’s also a scene where the two leads have sex after torturing each other verbally at a club. In the background is the poster for “Salo.” Is this Noé trying to suggest that the emptiness of the bourgeoise torture pales in comparison of a truly sexually charged political climate like in Pasolini’s work? If he is, he nails that one on the head! At least he’s self-aware about the fact that this is a middle-class, white man’s perspective on love and therefore, lacks any real conflict or passion.
But despite it’s knowing of its depthless insight (he made it in 3D. Get it? So it’s one dimensional but has dimension? Nudge, nudge), there’s little artistic redemption. Because in the end, “Love” is a sloppily written, meandering, repetitive, nauseatingly meta, and terribly acted work. I feel with such a film so enamoured with its own take on clichés, I should end this review with: “Love” stinks.