The Melbourne International Film Festival, Reviewed
The best, the worst, and the weirdest of what's coming to Australian movie screens in coming months.
The Film That Will Make For An Incredibly Awkward Date:
Love, dir. Gaspar Noé
Reviewed by: Harry Windsor
Sex would perhaps be a more accurate title for Love, the new 3D film from Irreversible director Gaspar Noé. Some Cannes pundits argued the film is all about the two being interchangeable, but this seems unlikely for a film whose protagonist — a budding filmmaker who calls his son ‘Gaspar’ — regularly has sex with women he doesn’t care about at all. It’s hard to remember a film so transparently autobiographical in which the lead is so deeply, defiantly unlikeable.
Judging by the collective eye-roll that greeted his film at Cannes, Noé is discovering what happens to an enfant terrible when they are no longer quite un enfant. Like Lars Von Trier, his outrageousness feels less like a public relations disaster than strategy, but Love is something else: an act of gleeful public masturbation and self-flagellation that feels sincere if only because it’s so unflattering.
The lead, an American in Paris named Murphy, is played by relative newcomer Karl Glusman, and as first starring roles go it feels very much like a last. I’ve never seen Glusman’s previous films, such as Starship Troopers: Invasion, but as Murphy he’s convincingly charmless. What the two principal women in his life — both absolute stunners, it doesn’t need to be said — see in him is a mystery. The only glimmer of a distinctive identity comes when Murphy and his girlfriend take their neighbour, a 16-year-old exchange student, to a club, en route to an ill-advised threesome.
Murphy wants to make films about the stuff of life: about “blood, sperm and tears”. Accordingly, Benoît Debie — Noé’s gifted cinematographer who put his neon stamp on Spring Breakers — shoots the film in a series of highly symmetrical blood-orange two-shots: of Murphy and his girlfriend at a diner, walking through a cemetery, and in bed (let’s be honest, they’re mainly in bed).
Murphy spends the film cycling through his memory, counting the ways in which jealousy and lust ruined his life and that of the woman he loved. Weeping, he tells his young child: “life isn’t easy, Gaspar”. And, like that line, the entire film knowingly invites mockery. At the very least, its openness to being laughed at makes Love an oddly credible work of pathos.
For Fans of: Benoît Debie, threesomes, asshole protagonists
Opening in Australia: TBC