Love (2015) (3-D)

Gaspar Noé's Love is a film that goes nowhere: except in a world that makes you want to throw up in disgust, nausea and amazement at the obsession with sex (and its conflation with "love", the title of the film) in the West, especially when it comes to directors of Latin American origins or influences. When a film doesn't make you think, doesn't touch you, is it a work of art? Watching Love is an uncomfortable experience: it doesn't even titillate you, as the sex is too much set up and devoid of realism. It makes you as uncomfortable as it does in a Tinto Brass film: and the similarities do not end there. Plot is as much non-existent, characters are as much bored, and acting is as much bad. Watching it in 3-D makes for an even worse experience: one feels trapped in a world where humans translate all beauty into the highs they get (or do not get) through their sexual activity. The modern world is a world where pervertedness and sickness are celebrated: we have had Brass himself, we have had films such as The Last Tango in Paris, we have had directors such as Polanski, and now we have films such as these. It is as if we have started celebrating the decadence of the human world, that we have consigned modern humanity and its future to doldrums of boredom and glitz.

I say glitz, also because Love is often tastefully shot: the green-dominated scene when Electra and Murphy sit in some kind of a cafe is very artistically shot, to take an example; there are many other amazing shots in the film, not necessarily of sex. The all-grey scene in the Père Lachaise cemetery, a fast tracking shot of the couple again, is also a marvel to watch. And yet art for art's sake does not make for art: without substance, style is wasted and even criminal. Without an aim, the film's main character, Murphy, may ramble on, in and out of women's vaginas; however, a film, with no aim to its making, is nothing but an exercise in pleasing one's own ego from the filmmaker's part, and Love as a film comes across as much a jerk as does Murphy.