Argentinian post-punk auteur Gaspar Noé makes movies that are solitary, nasty, brutish, and often very long. His newest film, Love, a two-hour 3-D porn with nihilistic tendencies, does little to assuage his reputation as a man concerned with the squalid things in life. The arthouse bacchanal premièred at Cannes, where it earned feedback ranging from “This is kinda bad” to “This is really bad.” Wider audiences might have different opinions, when the film arrives Stateside. (Alchemy picked it up for U.S. distribution, but hasn’t set a release date yet). Our own Mike D’Angelo had this to say about the film:
Love lets you know what you’re in for right away, opening with a lengthy scene, shot in an unbroken take, of a man and a woman gently masturbating each other to orgasm. Noé’s film is pornographic without being pornography, however. On the contrary, it’s an almost painfully earnest hindsight portrait of a failed relationship, in which the graphic fucking is just one of several crucial elements. Noé’s stand-in here is an aspiring American filmmaker named Murphy (Karl Glusman), who’s attending film school in Paris and longs to make a movie that would show real sex in the context of a tender love story. (Noé really doesn’t want anyone to misunderstand his intentions with this film.)
The film’s new trailer, which is obviously NSFW—and not safe for coffee shops, classrooms, or anywhere else besides private residences and adult novelty stores—gives us a (salty, acerbic) taste of what’s to come. The trailer isn’t exactly subtle or tender, even though star Aomi Muyock requests the latter. To be fair, most of the actual action is covered by the roving font that spells out “Love,” but by most mainstream movie-trailer standards, the obscured shot of a guy going down on a girl is still pretty graphic. By the time a deluge of semen comes cascading down the screen, you’ll know you shouldn’t expect subtlety or profundity in Love. You should expect lots and lots of bodily fluids.
The trail of the tape
Title: Love
Director: Gaspar Noé
Screenwriter: Gaspar Noé
Cast: Karl Glusman, Aomi Muyock, Klara Kristin
Release date: July 15 in France
The entire trailer in one line of dialogue: “What is your ultimate fantasy?”
The entire trailer in one screenshot:
For those of us not yet privy to Love, it remains to be seen whether Noé treats the material seriously. The flowing fluids suggest otherwise.