Love (3D), film review: Gaspar Noé's latest provocation is all sex and no story

Gaspar Noé, 135 mins. Starring: Aomi Muyock, Karl Glusman, Klara Kristin

Kiss and tell: Karl Glusman and Aomi Muyock in Gaspar Noé’s 3D ‘Love’

Gaspar Noé's brave but wildly misguided film is an attempt to make a movie depicting “sexual sentimentality”. It is graphic and not above prurient shock tactics. (Whether the 3D shot of ejaculation is a coup de cinema or a squirt in the eye of the audience is a matter of opinion.) The film is almost as full of references to other movies as it is of sex scenes. Its main character, Murphy (Karl Glusman), is an American film student in Paris. In case we are in any doubt that he loves cinema, we see posters of Pasolini or Scorsese films in the background. Murphy's mumbling voiceover is a little like that of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.

As in Noé's earlier Irreversible, the story starts at the end. Murphy is trapped in a relationship with Omi (Klara Kristin), a woman he doesn't much love but with whom he has a baby daughter. “Do you know how babies like you come to this world?” he asks her. The film can be seen as the answer to that question. In flashback, we learn of his obsession with his previous girlfriend, Electra (Aomi Muyock), who has gone missing. The sex is frankly but artfully shot. Murphy is like a cross between Henry Miller and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. He talks, in portentous fashion, of his dream of making movies out of “blood, sperm and tears”.

One of the stranger aspects here is that the characters are so young. Murphy tries to be world-weary and angst-ridden but often risks seeming merely like a brattish twenty-something student. He strives for profundity but his observations (“Living with a woman is like sharing a bed with the CIA: nothing is secret”) are sometimes very trite.

There are moments (as when Murphy and Electra invite their neighbour to join in a threesome) that play like something out of bad 1970s British exploitation movies starring Robin Askwith. These are interspersed with scenes of real tenderness, such as the initial meeting between Murphy and Electra. Noé isn't so much trying to titillate the audience as to chronicle a relationship through the lovemaking. As in Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs (2004), this proves an impossible and self-defeating challenge. In the end, there is just too much sex. In focusing so obsessively on physical intimacy, Noé hasn't left himself enough room to deal with anything else.