In 2014, Danish bad boy Lars von Trier unleashed Nymphomaniac, his sexually explicit magnum opus that served as a collective statement of his career so far. In Nymphomaniac, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tells her life story through a series of sexual exploits to an old man while recuperating in his apartment. Each chapter, that is each sexual adventure, is styled in one of Lars von Trier’s previous films, with Joe’s framing device allowing von Trier to pass sly commentary on his life and times while not destroying the conceit that this is a separate fictional construct.
This year, French bad boy Gaspar Noé unleashes Love, a sexually explicit opus seemingly serving as a collective statement of his career so far. And, here is where things get complicated. Lars von Trier had 37 years of filmmaking, 13 feature films, 1 documentary, 2 television series, and countless shorts to draw on; Gaspar Noé has 17 years, 3 feature films, and a small handful of shorts. The full director’s cut of Nymphomaniac is 5.5 hours long, Love is 130 minutes. In short, Love is akin to a sitcom having a clip show in episode two (see: Clerks).
Gaspar’s stand-in for Love is Murphy (Karl Glusman), an ex-pat filmmaker in Paris who hates his life. He doesn’t like his wife, Omi (Klara Kristin), is barely hanging on for their kid, and is in mourning for a relationship he hasn’t been in for at least two years. On one particularly trying day, Murphy discovers a voicemail from his ex-girlfriend’s mother asking if Murphy knew where Electra (Aomi Muyock) might be since she had been missing for two months. Sent into a downward spiral, Murphy smokes a bit of opium, the last present from Electra, and catalogues the relationship in a drug-fueled haze of sex, drugs, fighting, and infidelity.
Noé has never been a sentimental director, and he hasn’t grown a heart here. The fragmentary nature of Love recalls the disjoint of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where the relationship happens out of time. Where Michel Gondry operates from a naturalist’s embrace of emotion, Gaspar is a formalist who views emotions with the distance of an alien, expecting his visual construction and editing to carry all the weight that the script and actors cannot.
Karl Glusman is a relative newcomer whose main talents lie in his pants rather than in his acting. He’s quite handsome, has a nice body, and a decently sized penis, of which you see plenty. But, between this and his role in Stonewall as Joe, the Indiana quarterback who slept with blondie, Glusman’s acting ability could be as stiff as his…well… Muyock, bless her heart, tries her best against Glusman’s stiff deliveries, but there is no naturalism to be found in either the fighting or the romancing.
Noé really doesn’t have much to say about either love and relationships, memory, nor even his own filmography. He doesn’t even have much to say about explicit sex in film. The biggest statement Noé makes is about editing. Gaspar Noé’s formal technique stages each scene as a static shot, where the camera is placed in front of the actors while they recite their lines. But, using static shots creates a problem when it comes to editing. Butting up two cuts next to each other would create a jump cut. To get around this problem, Noé employs an editing technique where he separates cuts with a black space of nothingness. He uses this between scenes, and in the middle when he wants to jump to a separate topic. In one way, it’s a cheap and easy technique that cheats traditional editing, in another way, the technique resembles the way good actors will blink whenever their character changes trains of thought.
That Noé’s form is Love‘s strongest feature shouldn’t surprise even the biggest fan of Noé. Irreversible is hilarious because it’s a pisstake on Memento‘s structure that manages to surpass the original. There is nothing quite like Enter the Void, whose structure remains stronger than the content of a film where Noé, faced with time constraints, simply removed the 7th reel from the movie and nobody was the wiser. At 134 minutes, Love runs entirely too long, too repetitious, and too undeveloped for its content, but it still presents some striking visuals and, yes, lots of very explicit sex focused entirely on the male orgasm.