Here is the Cannes film festival’s 51st shade of … well, not grey, because director Gaspar Noé does have a penchant for that classic red-filter lighting appropriate for full-on filth, as well as a soupy sound-design and indistinct dialogue which sounds quieter than the deafeningly loud cheesy ambient music: soft rock and even, at one moment, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Love is Noé’s explicit sex film in 3D: that is, vanilla heterosexual sex, in girl-boy and girl-girl-boy permutations (you sure can tell a straight guy made this movie) with a conscientious emphasis on condoms. There is also one scene with a transsexual, with whom our male hero totally chickens out of doing anything rude. No spanking.
The 3D means at one stage we basically get a squelching of sperm swooshing out of the screen straight at the audience, as well as what can only be described as a nightmare penis-slit shot, rhythmically chugging in and out at us through a hideous tunnel of purple flesh big enough for Eurostar. And it often looks like the audience is going to need to duck when the male lead and his hefty phallus turns around, like Eric Sykes and his ladder. There are times when it looks like a Cinema Paradiso-type money-shot highlight showreel.
It’s hardcore, yet much softer-core than Noé’s earlier movies, without the terrifying shock factor of Irréversible and Seul Contre Tous, and without the visual brilliance of Enter the Void, and Love is preposterous and badly acted and talky in a way that porn films haven’t been since they were designed to be shown in cinemas: I was paradoxically reminded of Clive James’s memory of nervously taking his date to see Hiroshima Mon Amour and them becoming the first couple in history to see that film and not have sex afterwards.
But there is something endearing in its very monomaniacal quality: here is a film with just one subject, what Casanova called the “subject of subjects”: the subject we spend most of our time thinking about and not admitting it, and here is a film which actually shows you the sex, the thing that makes babies, as supposed to the general coy sexiness and come-on glamour that so many other films spend their time promoting.
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire