Film Archive

LOVE

Horizons 2015 / LOVE / France, Belgium 2015

After features that fairly worshiped at the altar of brutality, Gaspar Noé decided to make a movie about love. A true violator of form and content, he of course conceived of this particular emotion in his own inimitable way, embracing explicit sex as the key. Yet this 3D journey into nooks and crannies where polite company fears to tread is more than just a titillating spectacle; it’s also a love story with nostalgia-soaked overtones. Noé’s onscreen onslaught may slap the viewer to attention, but moviegoers will have to assess its impact on their own sense of modesty all alone.

Synopsis

The new work by boundary-pushing French filmmaker Gaspar Noé has been eagerly awaited for several years. Murky news that gradually made its way to the public promised much: the well-known violator of traditional form and content was shooting a movie about love. The record was soon set straight, however, about this outlandish claim. Love, yes, but expressed through sex – highly explicit and all in 3D. The poster, released a few months prior to the shoot and showcasing three close-up tongues connected by a fluid of debatable provenance, ricocheted around social media, and curiosity reached a fever pitch. The movie, about a man who recalls the most passionate relationship of his life over the course of a single day, premiered at this year’s Cannes festival, thus we already know it lived up to expectations. But its three-dimensional journey into nooks and crannies where polite company fears to tread is more than just a titillating spectacle; it’s also a love story with nostalgia-soaked overtones. Noé’s onscreen onslaught may slap the viewer to attention, but moviegoers will have to assess its impact on their own sense of modesty all alone.

Anna Kořínek

About the film

134 min / Color, DCP

Director Gaspar Noé / Screenplay Gaspar Noé / Dir. of Photography Benoît Debie / Editor Gaspar Noé, Denis Bedlow / Art Director Samantha Benne / Producer Gaspar Noé, Edouard Weil, Vincent Maraval, Brahim Chioua, Rodrigo Teixeira, Geneviève Lemal / Production Les Cinémas de la Zone, Rectangle Productions / Coproduction Wild Bunch, RT Features, Scope Pictures / Cast Karl Glusman, Aomi Muyock, Klara Kristin / Sales GoodFellas / Distributor Aerofilms

About the director

Gaspar Noé (b. 1963, Buenos Aires), screenwriter, cinematographer, actor, and director, earned his reputation as a controversial filmmaker early on in his career with the short Carne (1991) and its loose feature-length follow-up I Stand Alone (Seul contre tous, 1998). The two works are connected by the nameless character of the horse butcher, a man overly fixated on his mute and autistic daughter, whom he defends against the world with brutal violence. After this introduction, the butcher then appears in Noé’s next effort Irréversible (2002), starring the excellent Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel. Like the three previous titles, his next feature effort Enter the Void (2009) premiered at Cannes. In addition to his film work, Noé has also directed numerous music videos; the clip for the song “Protège moi” by Placebo was never broadcast due to the explicit nature of its content.