As a renowned filmmaker and provocateur of critical interest, Gaspar Noé is well known for his artistic infamy. Born out of a state-sponsored French film ecosystem that supports young, burgeoning artistic voices in the domestic film industry, Noé has received ample critical feedback on the provocative and transgressive content that typifies much of his oeuvre. Christened by the media as an enfant terrible, reception surrounding Noé has perennially been divisive — to his own personal enthusiasm. Much of this evaluative stance owes to the dispiriting conditions facing his characters as they frequently deal with abjection, sexual violence, and abuse. However, one Noé film features a significant lack of this taxing material, and yet, has received the most negative attention.
Noé’s fourth feature Love (2015) has generally been regarded with the most critical derision, while it mostly eschews the difficult content of sexual violence and death that qualifies his first two films. The story deals with an American film student Murphy (Karl Glusman) waking up to a dissatisfied life in Paris with his girlfriend Omi (Klara Kristin) and son Gaspar (Ugo Fox). Gaspar had accidentally been conceived out of an adulterous encounter with Murphy’s neighbor Omi when his then-girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock) was away. A consensual tryst between the three occurred beforehand, with Murphy wrongly seeking more sex after the couple’s mutual agreement to explore a third sexual partner, but only together. Noé’s depictions of sexuality here are unflinching, but such sexuality has mostly been coercive, or directly abusive in his other films, along with a slew of other challenging material. Therefore, I intend to offer an assessment in favor of Love, against the critical conjecture that it is a weaker film in Noé’s filmography, despite its attenuation of violence and sexual transgressions which has critically defined his prior films.
Noé’s debut feature, Seul contre tous/I Stand Alone (1998), begins with a conversation that questions morality and justice. These ethics are challenged throughout the narrative as the nameless lead (Philippe Nahon) endures increasing desperation in his abject state, which propels him towards misguided assumptions of what is moral and just. These abhorrent violent and sexual desires are symptoms of a dispiriting existence plagued by a lifetime of abuse and rejection. Noé’s lead in I Stand Alone does experience what may be a posturing of love with his daughter (Blandine Lenoir) but it is coercive and abusive at its core. This exacting material sets the stage for more difficult content in his next two films.
The delirious and nauseating opening to Irréversible/Irreversible (2002) offers feverish camerawork that navigates spaces of sexual transgression and abject violence. The film knowingly begins on these challenging terms in order to explore the theme of entropy, as signaled in Irreversible’s apparent mantra, “Time destroys all things.” The initial critical uproar to this overtly confronting content is completely understandable, although further critical analysis has brought fruitful considerations and constructive re-evaluations to the film since its inciting debut at Cannes. In his 2014 monograph Irreversible, Tim Palmer contends that, “While Irreversible might undeniably be controversial in terms of the effects it has on viewers, in its constitution Noé’s work is also devastatingly inventive and catalytic, a decisive contribution to contemporary film-making.” Thus, reactionary responses that briskly dismiss Noé’s films because of their exigent images, instead could use Noé’s rousing films as a platform for more thoughtful dialogues on how his work does evidence certain aesthetic value through its formal intensities.
In his follow-up project to Irreversible, Enter the Void (2009) presents an incendiary opening sequence. The visual content of Enter the Void rushes in as Noé issues an onslaught of swift, strobing credits. This technical bravura, while (over)stimulating, batters the senses, thrusting the viewer headfirst into its agitated formal aesthetics. These arousing techniques further include habitual stroboscopic effects, as well as a spectral first-person perspective that is articulated through Noé and Benoît Debie’s gyrating cinematography. This intensified visual kineticism explored generously in Irreversible, is taken further in its execution and constitutes long, even tedious, portions of the film as a drug-induced meditation on death, memory, and childhood trauma.
The daring technical content of this camerawork is matched with equally provocative narrative content regarding the main characters. The relationship between siblings Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (Paz de la Huerta) challenges perceptible boundaries of intimacy. The incorporeal POV that dominates the film speaks volumes to the suggestions of an underlying eroticism in their emotional bond to one another, as do Oscar’s memory sequences. However, early evidence in the physical space of their flat also suggests this with its undifferentiated personal space, single bed, and loveseat. These incestuous desires that simmer beneath the surface of Oscar and Linda’s relationship recall transgressive impulses felt in I Stand Alone, which is also cited with Nahon’s cameo in Irreversible. Oscar and Linda are never violent in the manner of Noé’s first two films, but sexual taboos and challenging intimacy are certainly consistent across his films. Other sources of violence are evidenced by Oscar’s shocking first-person death (which the audience is intimately aligned with) and in Linda’s graphic abortion.
Both Irreversible and Enter the Void begin with physical violations and suggestions of intimate transgression, whereas Love does not present these themes at face value. There is sexual explicitness to be evidenced, but it is consensual and with apparent love. In I Stand Alone, ostensible love is vehemently justified on odious terms, while in Irréversible, love and constructive passion are on display, but only after understanding its entropy and corporeal destruction, can it be appreciated — at least in these narrative terms. There is, of course, an entropic quality to Love’s characters and the eponymous quality of their relationship, but this comes without the stark violence, death, and abjection that contextualizes his prior three films.
While Noé’s audience for Irreversible must endure acute violence and violation in order to experience a moment of genuine intimacy through its regressing narrative structure, Love opens on a scene of demonstrative affection. Noé begins Love with a static shot of Electra and Murphy in medias res: a scene of mutual masturbation. A long take ensues, culminating in a visible orgasm for Murphy. This erotic scene is a prelude to the memories to come. While sexually explicit, this instance is neither obscene, incendiary, nor distressing — like the openings of his other films. Here on display is a moment of requited pleasure, a period of warmth and sanguine reflection. This sweetness bitters though, as revelations of infidelity, betrayal, and speculation of death give Murphy’s memories a melancholic sensibility, as he reflects on his time with Electra.
The kinetic, disorienting camerawork evident in his previous two films is largely absent in Love. Instead, there are more subtle tracking shots and even more of those which remain static. Rhythms between shots are punctuated by brief cuts to black that come at irregular intervals. This blinking aesthetic, while prominent throughout his oeuvre, more so resembles the narrative style and pacing of I Stand Alone — though depictions of sexuality are far less salacious than Noé’s first feature. This makes sense, considering that Noé intended for Love (then titled Danger) to be a follow-up project to I Stand Alone. Since Love is not as noticeably defined by its bold formal techniques like camerawork, more attention can be given in criticizing the script — which is admittedly juvenile, at times, especially regarding Murphy’s dialogue. However, it is also valuable to recognize that the immaturity and selfish attitudes in the dialogue (and perhaps the slew of self-referential media that Noé displays throughout the film) are reflections of Murphy. He is not the hero of this narrative, nor is he meant to be explicitly admired. He is but a case figure in the film’s dismantlement of ideal love, or at least its volatility. Autobiographical traces are plentiful throughout the film, but Noé has publicly dismissed the notion that Murphy is a direct stand-in for his personal interests.
The self-reflexive aspects of the film (a trait emblematic of the nouvelle vague) are abundant here. Noé stars as a fictional version of himself as a gallery owner identified only by his surname, he uses his prenom for Murphy’s child, and Murphy himself is a dubious proxy for Noé himself given his aspirations to be a director, a vague physical resemblance, and tastes in film culture (his name is also inspired by Noé’s mother, Nora Murphy). Noé even imparts some sentimental recognition for his partner Lucile Hadžihalilović in a scene with Murphy’s ex-girlfriend who shares the same name (Xamira Zuloaga). While indulgent, this work bears personal significance for Noé, and he even pitched the idea to Vincent Cassell and Monica Bellucci, before settling on the script for Irreversible. When asked about autobiographical elements of the film, at Cannes, Noé offered that his interests and cultural tastes were a basis for Murphy, but the character is really a composite of himself, his friends, and what he aspired to depict as the average heterosexual Western male. Murphy is not meant to have a privileged identification but is an emissary for the average person, steeped in faults, and not to be envisioned as an imagined hero.
It is also important to both acknowledge Murphy’s role as an unreliable narrator, like Nahon in I Stand Alone, as well as the questionable value of male viewers positively identifying with his character, like Vincent in Irreversible. While Noé intends to provoke and agitate his audience, he does not seem to advocate for moral claims surrounding his characters and their actions. Rather, he interrogates the relationships of his characters across his oeuvre and examines their consequential effects, while creating affective experiences through incisive formal techniques. These techniques often relay an aesthetic quality of artistic counterpoints in order to create tension: gyrating camerawork paired with stillness; long shot lengths punctuated by nictitating editing transitions; and assaultive sexuality contending with moments affirming intimacy. Conflicts of love and abjection define Noé’s work, making evaluations of his aesthetics equally stimulating and confounding. I would offer that the most alarming attribute of Love is Noé’s inclusion of a (simulated) sex scene of his own character with Electra. Feedback to which I would welcome in response to his proclivity for a cameo inclusion, as evidenced before in his droll masturbation scene during the opening of Irreversible.
This examination of Love does not necessarily take a complete defensive stance for the film, but instead endeavors to offer considerations of its inherent value. Murphy clearly exhibits fallible traits of internalized exclusivity, queerphobia, masculine biases, and infidelity. But he is not meant to be an exemplary hero, but rather a scrutinized figure in the tentative dynamics of love, in all its sincerity, erroneous aspirations, warmth, and degradation. Melancholy and resentment frame the memories that pervade Love, and Noé provokes his audience through these dramatic implications. This differs from the death and sexual violence that permeate his other films and have subsequently resulted in negative contentions that challenge his moral value as a filmmaker. Noé is unfazed by the press criticizing and demeaning his work. In fact, he delights in the stirring and conflicting responses to his films. But the additional criticism of Love, compared to his other more challenging material, is thought-provoking. It wouldn’t be undue to surmise that those general critics expect to contend with his work, and thus offer criticism of undue consideration. Love is stimulating and challenging in its dramatic content, but I would argue that it upholds aesthetic value, despite its ostensible lack of technical bravura, as seen in Irreversible and Enter the Void. At first glance, the character performances may seem clumsy and the dialogue trite. But there is a naturalistic quality to the execution of the film that renders an acute sense of physical and emotional intimacy. While some responders view Love as a thoughtless exercise in depicting erotic habits, I find the film to be a woolly articulation of sensual love that may not be wholly original but is undeniably fresh content in Noé’s perilous work as a filmmaker.
Noé is tactfully dismissive of the conjecture of this movie being controversial for its unsimulated sex scenes. In response, he differentiates Love from the mechanical sexuality of pornography, acknowledges a patrilineal aversion to erotic male stimulation in onscreen media, and notes the ellipsis of explicit carnal love found in most commercial film narratives. Noé offers this: “what’s weird is that you never see images of carnal love in a narrative movie or in a commercial movie. You just see people talking about love and then they wake up the next morning. The scenes that are the most important are always missing in commercial movies. There’s no reason.” And while much of the film has been critiqued for its soporific runtime and puerile script, Love is certainly Noé’s most embracing and tender film. Critical contentions of erotic tedium are conundrums worth further consideration — as this creates an aesthetic tension through which we may explore the innate values of erotic love, and how that can be appreciated with a knowing decline.
Entropy is a salient theme throughout Noé’s work and is surely present here in this film. But while this may nurture a sense of emotional (sometimes physical) brutality, at least there are remembered moments of amour. Qualities of tenderness here, and especially in the near-end (near-beginning) of Irreversible, avows itself openly and is ignorant of the troubled moments to follow. Irreversible is most affecting given its reserved plot where the harsh moments are a prelude for a peaceful and hopeful past. This is felt near the end of Love where we see a flashback of Murphy and Electra’s first meeting at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont — a place where they visit again (before) as a site of familiarity and hope. French locations that signal yearning and romantic optimism can also be found in locales like the Mont-Saint-Michel in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder (2012). Incidentally, in his review of Love, Peter Debruge makes a reproving comment of the hazy cinematographic and narrative similarities between the two films. But if I may be so self-concerned as Noé, I contend that he offers audiences circumstances of entropic reflection, where alone, we enter the void of love in its consequences of affection, estrangement, aches, and irreversibility.
The final scene of Love with the couple entangled in the tub is perhaps the warmest evidence of endearment in Noé’s oeuvre. The audience’s awareness of the torment to come makes the reflective moments of eros in the narrative that much more distressing, but also more precious in their tenderness. Raptured in their mutual embrace — a gesture that recalls the opening scene — Electra entreats Murphy, “Please. Don’t you ever leave me.” To which he answers, “I promise. I will love you ‘til the end.” The scene then becomes saturated in red, and black bold titles cover the couple’s bodies, reading “THE END.” It is a final moment that is rich and optimistic as a remembrance, but also deeply sad knowing that this love will be irrevocably broken. This tension between love and abjection furnishes an aesthetic in Noé’s work that is at once confronting and comforting. In Love, Noé indulgently, yet perceptively, provokes his audience to consider the effects and conditions of eros, as it is an integral component in our notions of love itself. This narrative of love that we create for ourselves is rarely as complete in its ideal as we aspire it to be. But at the end of this (our) story where we meet brutality, rejection, and possible death, at least we find a little love along the way.
