Love (2015)

Gaspar Noé's Love arrives with the solemnity of a confession and the mechanics of a provocation. Murphy, an American film student in Paris, spends a rainy January day recalling Electra, the girlfriend who has vanished, and the two years of drugs, rough sex, and tenderness that preceded her disappearance. The film is remembered, when it is remembered at all, for its unsimulated sex scenes, shot in 3D, roughly half its running time, and for Noé's cheerful prediction that it would give men an erection and make women cry. That is the entire thesis. The camera lingers, the bodies entwine, and the plot, such as it is, concerns a broken condom and an unplanned pregnancy.

In the ledger of contemporary social consciousness, the film is a blank page, and it seems proud of it. The cast is a natural international mix, an American, a Dane, a Frenchwoman, assembled because the story is set in Paris, not to make a statement. The central threesome is heterosexual. Race never surfaces as a subject. There is no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no affirmation of body diversity, no framework for reading Electra's depression as anything but private ruin. Noé is interested in obsession, jealousy, and the specific gravity of a memory, and he pursues them with a single-mindedness that borders on the monastic. The film lectures no one, which is perhaps its only restraint.

What remains is a mood piece about desire and its aftermath, executed with technical confidence and almost no interest in meaning beyond the sensory. It is the work of a filmmaker who would rather show than tell, and who has concluded that showing, at sufficient length and in three dimensions, is argument enough. The result is neither instructive nor especially illuminating. It is a long, humid recollection of a relationship that ended badly, and it asks nothing of us except our attention and, ideally, our arousal. The classification of such a film is straightforward. There is very little here to unsettle anyone's politics, and that, for once, appears to be the point.