Inspired partly as a more optimistic answer to Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013), Noé goes light on his violence. Meanwhile, their own proclivities are persistent but not particularly new or weird. At one point, Murphy and Electra visit a porn shop and gasp at the various perversions on display. The couple try a threesome with Omi, visit a swingers sex club and experiment with a transsexual prostitute, who serves (sadly) as a comic sideshow. Why does her libido have to have a tragic resolution? In fact, for all the fuss that will be kicked up about the breaking of boundaries, Love is consciously not a transgressive work and relies on some terribly shop-worn clichés. And Electra is that age-old stereotype of a wild woman of sexual appetite who refuses to be tamed. With Murphy revealed to be something of a misogynistic arsehole in the first five minutes, his arc from joyful boyfriend to duplicitous, jealous shit isn’t exactly a shocker. The problem is with this ‘drama’, of which there is little. Murphy’s apartment is decorated with film posters Noé put up and the influences of Kubrick and Bertolucci among others throbs heavily throughout the drama. The colours are gorgeous and the sex is filmed with an erotic abandon that’s intermittently sexy, usually from above. The 3D is largely a gimmick, failing to suggest intimacy and involvement, but used to hilarious if predictable effect when it comes to a penis doing what penises often will. Murphy leaps into action and takes opium, spending the rest of the proceedings in a strange fugue state.Īs with Irreversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2010), Noé has made a stylish film entirely his own, with his fixed camera keeping Murphy and Electra for the most part dead-centre. On his phone, he finds messages from Electra’s mother who is trying to find her daughter. His voiceover informs us that he hates his wife with a venom that appears unwarranted. Murphy lives with Omi and his baby son, Gaspar. After this prelude, we are brought to the present. That this should be one of the recurring sex acts in a film which isn’t exactly a Kama Sutra of variety hints that it’s Noé’s sly admission of what his overall project is really about. The film starts following an explicit scene of mutual masturbation. Neighbour Omi (Klara Kristin) is the lucky gal to be lumbered with Murphy’s offspring.
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