Love (2015)

From various sources, including personal friends and real-life stories I have ever read, I have always heard that if you want to destroy a loving relationship, just get involved in a threesome and things will eventually fall apart from there. Judging simply by his latest feature Love (2015), it seems that even a drug-addled hedonist like French-based Argentinean auteur Gaspar Noé (I Stand Alone, Enter the Void) believes this to be true, though admittedly the film deals with much more issues than that, as an explicitly erotic melodrama depicting the remarkably destructive failed romance of two young and dumb degenerates of the emotionally erratic sort who like to fight and fuck. The director’s most sexually explicit yet least violent work to date as a 3-D flick jam-packed with tons of highly stylized unsimulated sex scenes, Noé’s 135-minute epic erotic tragic romance has naturally been described by many people in the press as a “3-D porno,” but that would certainly be selling it somewhat short, especially if you’re a cinephile and/or have ever loved someone that you wish you could get back.  Of course, as demonstrated by his quasi-campy government-funded safe sex PSA Sodomites (1998) and his onanistic segment “We Fuck Alone” from the erotic anthology film Destricted (2006) reveal, Noé is no stranger to working with pornographic content, so it is pretty much seemed inevitable that he would eventually direct a full-on feature-length fuck-fest featuring ethereal ejaculations and phantasmagoric fellating. Indubitably Noé’s least thematically and aesthetically ambitious yet most overtly erotic work to date, the auteur actually came up with the idea for the film about 17 years ago and originally planned to make it in the early 2000s with Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel in the lead roles but apparently the then-married couple were not too smitten with exposing their sex life to the public or doing decidedly debasing things like getting involved in a threesome with a tranny, so they went ahead and thankfully collaborated on the superior film Irréversible (2002) instead. Featuring a novice actor as the male lead and two non-actresses with nil acting experience as the female leads, Love is ultimately a valiant attempt by an auteur to make a realistic depiction of a failed romance from a distinctly sexual perspective (or what the would-be-filmmaker protagonist of the film describes as, “sentimental sexuality”). Even more shamelessly self-indulgent than Noé’s previous feature Enter the Void (2009) as an obviously autobiographical work that makes incessant references to the director’s personal life and favorite films in both overt and hermetic fashions, the fuck-filled flick was largely improvised, especially sexually speaking (apparently, Noé would simply setup a scene and let the actors go from there), and was shot from a mere seven-page script. Not unlike his previous works, especially the short Carne (1991) and its feature-length sequel I Stand Alone (1998), Love also reveals Noé’s somewhat humorous contempt and loathing for his adopted nation of France, especially the nation's capital Paris, which is depicted as a virtual gigantic bordello that is inhabited by intemperate sex-obsessed hedonists, jaded swingers, drug addicts, and pretentious pussy-obsessed art fags who are too weak and psychologically broken to maintain healthy romances that involve trust and commitment. Starring boyish up-and-coming American actor Karl Glusman—a Bronx-born bro with a Irish-Catholic mother and German-Jewish father who somewhat resembles a Melungeon (or a octoroon or mustefino)—in lead role as a character named after Noé’s mom who feels imprisoned to a woman he does not love but unfortunately knocked up that spends most of the film recollecting his bittersweet relationship with his all-time great love after her despondent mother randomly leaves him a worrisome voicemail because she has gone missing, the carefully constructed piece of quasi-artsy-fartsy erotica might be dripping with buckets of steaming cum and cunt juice but it is hardly sexually stimulating as a malignantly melancholic melodrama that depicts the disintegration of a hot and heavy romance between two sad and pathetic virtual adult children who would certainly not be doing the world a favor by reproducing with one another. 

 After recently watching Hebraic hipster Henry Jaglom’s helically structured debut feature A Safe Place (1971) featuring Orson Welles as a nonsensical Yiddish magician, I have to say I am somewhat less impressed with Noé’s unconventional narrative structures, especially in regard to Love, which oftentimes seem like a less successful take on the editing of Irréversible.  Still, the film's non-linear narrative is more seamlessly woven and sensible than the sort of conspicuously contrived masturbatory storytelling that one associates with a Tarantino flick. Essentially, Noé’s latest feature unfolds in a somewhat predictable fashion where the viewer comes to realize how the protagonist ended up in his current pathetic plight as a result of the dissolution of his self-destructive romance with a woman that he is more or less addicted to and still cannot get over, even though she humiliated him in a variety of ways, including coercing him into taking part in a traumatizing threesome with a deep-voiced silicone-ridden tranny and cheating on him with an old fart with a cheap grey toupee (who is humorously portrayed by Noé himself in a cock-flashing performance). Produced by Vincent Maraval, who also produced the white-girl-exploiting towelhead hack Abdellatif Kechiche’s epically overrated Sapphic pseudo-arthouse turd Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013), Love comes very much from the same school of over-extended ‘auteurist erotica,’ but luckily it at least transcends mere titillation and communicates an important message about the absurdity of love and romance and how people that are oftentimes sexually perfect one another also makes for the most toxic of couples. Also, thankfully the film features real women with real bushy beavers as opposed to the completely bald baby gashes that are quite typical of both porn stars and western women nowadays. Indeed, were it not for the fact that the protagonist is an annoyingly whiny and scrawny stoner asshole of the radically repellent sort whose oftentimes enraging presence ultimately gets in the way of fine female flesh, the film might be somewhat arousing it parts. A film that predictably proposes that monogamy is unnatural, undesirable, and imprisoning (even though auteur Noé is married to French-Bosnian arthouse filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović), Love is also probably Noé’s most innately immature and imbecilic work as a film that unintentionally demonstrates that when you’re raised by far-left-wing parents, you will probably never fully grow up as you have been indoctrinated with a skewed pseudo-morality that teaches that mindless self-indulgence and promiscuity are virtues that are practiced by ostensibly enlightened and progressive individuals. In other words, the film certainly seems like it could have been directed by a LSD-addled fratboy who decided that his lecherous life would make for poignant cinematic art.  On the other hand, Noé is hardly sympathetic towards the swingers, dopers, and whores that the film depicts, thus hinting that he is not as morally bankrupt as he seems (indeed, sometimes the film seems like it was directed by a sort of reformed libertine who seems to sense certain things are degenerate, yet is too hopelessly debauched to fully realize and articulate why).

 Opening with a scene of what Noé once described as “A sweet double hand job” of protagonist Murphy (Karl Glusman) getting his rump-splitter stroked by his (ex)girlfriend Electra (Swiss model Aomi Muyock, who Noé met at a party) while he thumbs her clit in an awkward position in a dark shadowy room to the less than erotic sounds of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 3,” Love immediately comes off as a pretentious fuck flick, but luckily when the lovelorn lead character begins to mumble moronic shit to himself about how much he hates his current life it becomes quite obvious that the film was not directed by someone who thinks of himself as the cinematic heir of Robert Bresson. Like director Noé, Murphy is a foreigner living in Paris whose all-time favorite film is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and who has no problem mocking his adopted nation and its people (in fact, at one point the protagonist humorously describes the attendants of a Parisian art gallery party as, “Bourgeois French fucks…with their heads so far up their asses.”). Murphy was once an aspiring filmmaker that came to Paris to study film, but after accidentally getting a proudly pro-life oriented underage blonde fuck-buddy named Omi (played by Danish painter’s assistant Klara Kristin, who Noé randomly discovered dancing at a night club ) pregnant after the condom broke during sex and becoming the father of a baby boy named Gaspar, his life has been total hell as he absolutely loathes his baby-momma, who he fears will turn his son gay, and seems to no longer have any aspirations of becoming some sort of great auteur. While Murphy’s apartment used to be covered in an eclectic assortment of vintage film posters ranging from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) to Armand Weston’s Sadean porn chic era roughie The Defiance of Good (1975) to D.W. Griffith’s classic silent era KKK masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915), his flat was completely taken over and redecorated by odious twat Omi to the point where only one small corner of a room still contains items from his previous life. At the very beginning of the film, Murphy begins to endure an emotionally debilitating tidal wave of bittersweet nostalgia when he is rudely awakened by a voicemail message notice on his cellphone that was left by his ex-girlfriend Electra’s mother Nora (Isabelle Nicouf), who he has not hard from in over two years. The last time Murphy talked to Nora, she yelled at him, “You should be ashamed” and “You destroyed my daughter, my only daughter,” so he quite rightly realizes that it is “not a good sign” if she is trying to get in contact with him after two years. When Murphy listens to the voicemail, he hears Nora state in a clearly upset fashion, “I’m sorry to bother you on the first of January but I haven’t had news from my daughter in the past two months…and I’m worried…and I know that she was in a suicidal mood. If you can call me, that would be nice. I am very, very worried. Thank you.” As the viewer obviously suspects right from the get-go, Love does not have a happy ending. 

 It has been two years since Murphy foolishly irreparably destroyed his relationship with Electra by recklessly fucking Omi behind her back and getting the bitchy Lolita-like blonde. Murphy probably thought it was OK to cheat on Electra with Omi because the three previously engaged in an intense weed-fueled threesome, but he never suspected that one lousy and seemingly inconsequential fuck session would ultimately destroy both his entire life and relationship. Since she is firmly against abortion because she was herself the product of promiscuity and was thus always resented and looked at as a bad accident by her apparently unloving mother, Omi refused to get an abortion and Murphy suspects that she intentionally got pregnant, even at one point in the film thinking to himself regarding the current state of his miserable life, “I’m sick of this bitch. Go take care of the baby…and leave me alone, please. She tricked me…I know she did. Living with a woman is like sharing a bed with the CIA – nothing’s secret. This used to be my apartment. I used to be happy here. It doesn’t feel like my place anymore…Always looking over my shoulder now.” After receiving the voicemail from Nora, Murphy cannot help but obsessively recollecting the pure passion and ecstasy of his hot and heavy romance with Electra who, quite unlike Omi, was a woman that he truly loved and adored, even if he treated her like shit from time to time and vice cersa. In fact, as he incessantly states throughout the film, Murphy still loves Electra and literally prays to god that she will come back to him. As depicted in a flashback scene, Electra once handed him opium and told him, “If something bad happens in your life and I’m not there, it will protect you,” so Murphy decides it is a good time to get high on the drug while recalling his sometimes good, equally bad, and at times downright ugly relationship with the one all-time true love of his life.  As Murphy's story ultimately reveals, it is always better to suffer pain and heartbreak with someone you love than to endure a sterile and boring existence with someone you don't.

 As one can expect from a Noé flick, Love more or less depicts the story of Murphy’s relationship with Electra in reverse order, beginning with the beyond bitter breakup as provoked when the lead confessed to his lover that he got another woman pregnant and concluding at the very beginning of their romance when everything seemed magical and immaculate. Like with many intense relationships, Murphy and Electra almost immediately fucked and declared their love for one another not long after meeting on happenstance in a scenic Paris park. While the two made a vow to one another to never let anyone get between them, both of them would eventually break that vow in a number of ways to the point where they eventually even encouraged one another’s debauchery, thereupon inevitably destroying their relationship entirely. As depicted in flashbacks, aside from their brief ménage à trios with Omi (who was notably only 15-going-on-16 at the time of their initial threesome), Murphy and Electra also engaged in group sex at a swingers club and even engaged in a threesome with a creepy deep-voiced tranny in a sickening scenario that the protagonist naturally rather regretted to the point where he proclaims that he wishes he could erase it from his mind. Notably, Electra convinced Murphy to get in the three-way tryst with the tranny by absurdly arguing, “It would be a good compromise. Some boobs, some cocks.” The sexual dysfunction in their doomed relationship began when Murphy foolishly decided to follow an overtly slutty girl into a bathroom under the pretense of snorting some lines of cocaine, only for the lecherous little lady to whip out a condom instead of coke and then sit on his cock in an all too effortless fashion, as if it was something she had done many times before. Unbeknownst to Murphy, Electra had already cheated on him with her opulent yet borderline physically grotesque gallery owner ex-boyfriend ‘Noé’ (Gaspar Noé).  Indeed, since she is an aspiring painter, Electra thought it would be good for her career to ride the cock of her ex-beau, who originally dumped because, as she states, “He was old, but he wanted younger.”  Needless to say, when Murphy gets extremely drunk at one of Noé’s gallery showings, he decides to confront his nemesis and ultimately breaks a bottle over his head, thereupon messing up the art dealer's preposterous wig in the process. Being a rich pussy who does not have the testicular fortitude to fight back and instead resolves his problems like a welfare queen who considers the government her suger-daddy, vengeful Noé triumphantly declares to Murphy, “You piece of shit! I’m going to feed you to the cops” and has him arrested. Somewhat humorously, while being questioned about his supposed crimes by a smug four-eyed cop, Murphy justifies his actions by proudly stating, “I’m proud of what I did […] Fucking France. 1918 was the last time you guys won a war. Since then what have you done? Nothing. Sitting on your asses eating. I’m an American. I’m an American. We fight for what we believe in.” Somewhat inexplicably, despite his somewhat rude behavior, Murphy befriends the cop and while the two are sharing a beer at a bar, the policeman reveals that he is just as degenerate as the average stereotypical French bourgeois pussy by stating, “You’re in France, forget about your American feeling of possession. Of ownership. Of war, of violence. Try to think differently. In the United States…in the ‘60s, you were different. People were loving each other. What’s wrong with going in a club and fucking all the women? Because you know you’ll fuck other women in your life. But you’ll fuck other women behind her back.” Ultimately, Murphy makes the moronic mistake of following the cop’s misguided advice and takes Electra to a swingers club where they engage in lame group sex that only further divides the two lovers.  Indeed, for whatever reason, it seems that Murphy and Electra believe that the best way to repair their irreparably broken relationship is by engaging in as much group sex as possible, thus reflecting their badly busted moral compasses and innate incapacity for logical reasoning and personal reflection.

 Aside from the fact that the two lovers cannot seem to keep their genitals in their underwear for more than a couple minutes, Murphy and Electra’s romance is further compounded by a vicious cycle of substance abuse that eventually begins to reach self-obliterating proportions. Indeed, after Murphy reveals to Electra that he got Omi pregnant, she reacts hysterically by hooking up with the protagonist’s revoltingly swarthy cocaine-peddling buddy Julio (Juan Saavedra), who takes full advantage of the female protagonist's glaring vulnerabilities. In fact, Murphy even goes so far as to describe Electra as a “junky,” though he is totally willing to overlook that fact if she somehow comes back to him as clearly indicated at one point in the film where he thinks to himself, “It’s true she was a junky. I would forgive everything. I would always love her…if she would forgive me. Please Electra, come back to me. Come back. Come back. Come back. I want to be in your arms. I want you to hug me. To hold me. Please hug me. Please hold me.” Despite the fact he once stated to her during a fight, “You will never, ever be a good mother. Ever! You’ll never be able to mother a child because you are a venomous cunt,” Murphy’s biggest regret seems to be never having a child with Electra, or as he thinks to himself while on the brink of crying, “She said we could do anything together. But there’s one thing we never did. We never made a baby.” In fact, Murphy curiously named his son Gaspar after the child he originally planned to have with Electra, who wanted to have no less than seven child number because she absurdly felt it was a lucky number (notably, when asked in an interview with uproxx.com about what he felt was the most emotional scene in his film, Noé remarked regarding Murphy's decision to name his son Gaspar, “...the fact that the guy is mad enough at the girl that they considered having a baby of a particular name and then just two months later he’s giving the same name to someone else, with another girl, I thought that was very cruel. I was shocked by the idea that someone can promise the moon to someone and then be setting the moon to someone else just a few months later. Because the guy pretends he’s sentimental but the guy is not as sentimental as he thinks he is.”). At the very end of the film while sobbing in a bathtub, Murphy reaches rock bottom in terms of heartbreak, succumbs to melancholic madness, and dreams of a pregnant Electra appearing to him. Of course, given the fact that she has suicidal tendencies and once told Murphy that she is more afraid of pain than death and “rather commit suicide” than face it, Electra is probably already dead and the protagonist knows it. Unlike her previous boyfriends, Murphy was the first man that Electra truly loved and she even told the protagonist at one point in their relationship that if they ever broke up, she “would probably have to disappear,” which is a promise that she ultimately fulfilled. At the very end of the film while Murphy is all by his lonesome sobbing in a bathtub, his toddler son Gaspar wanders into the bathroom, which only makes the protagonist all the more upset. While embracing his son and crying even more hysterically, Murphy moans, “Gaspar, I’m so sorry. Life is not easy. Someday you’ll understand. Please forgive me. I am lost.” In the end, Electra and Murphy are depicted embracing in the bathtub, with the former remarking, “Please. Don’t leave me” and the protagonist, “I promise…I will love you until the end.” Of course, the viewer does not doubt that, at least in his own way, Murphy will always love Electra, even if her body is no more. 

 Undoubtedly, with its various overly conscious scenes where you can practically imagine auteur Gaspar Noé winking at you, Love becomes downright cringe-worthy and Fremdsham-inducing at various points, especially during a scene where the protagonist declares, “You know what my biggest dream in life is? My biggest dream is to make a movie that truly depicts sentimental sexuality.” In another scene of auterist meta-masturbation, Noé makes it even more apparent that the film his autobiographical when the protagonist declares while more or less pseudo-poetically describing the film's synopsis, “I want to make movies out of blood, sperm and tears. This is like the essence of life. I think movies should contain that. They should be made of that.” Indeed, in that sense, Love is like Noé own strangely sappy semen-soaked equivalent to Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) as a shamelessly self-reflexive cinematic work that takes a ‘pornographic’ approach to lovelorn nostalgia. Despite undoubtedly being the director’s most overtly sexually explicit work, the film is also somewhat ironically Noé’s most innately ‘softcore’ and least subversive effort to date, as if he made it as sort of masturbatory experiment in cinematic technique to get some practice in preparation for beginning a more ambitious and highly personalized auteur-driven phase in his career. Certainly one of the most annoying aspects of the film is that it attempts to depict so-called “sentimental sexuality,” yet the characters are far too soulless, immature, and just plain stupid for the viewer to feel even the slightest inkling of empathy for them, even if you’re able to superficially sympathize with certain aspects of their plight, henceforth hinting that Noé is too debauched and emotionally stunted to ever become a great auteur filmmaker. After all, impregnating random underage teenage sluts, getting involved in threesomes with shemales, and hanging out with wealthy ex-lovers are not very intelligent gambles to make in a relationship if you believe that you have found your soul mate. It seems that even Noé’s far-left-wing mother has a more practical view of his talents as a filmmaker as demonstrated in an interview with Dazed Digital where the director stated, “When she was still alive, my mother came with me to Cannes and she enjoyed it [IRREVERSIBLE]. And two years ago, I told her I was going to do a movie that was very sexual (with LOVE). She said, ‘No, you’re better at violence. You should do another violent movie.’ I said, ‘No, mum, I want to do a movie about love.’ So that’s what I did.” 

 A work that is surely pathologically cinephiliac, albeit thankfully not in an obnoxious Tarantino-esque sort of fashion, Love pays tribute to various films and filmmakers in a number of ways that makes it quite clear that genuinely Noé loves cinema. Indeed, aside from the fact that the film’s protagonist's apartment is covered with vintage posters for films ranging from Fritz Lang’s M (1931) to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) to Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), the flick also features excerpts from John Carpenter’s musical score for Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Bobby Beausoleil’s score for Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1972), thus underscoring the fact that the director is not exactly a fan of romance flicks, let alone great master auteurs like Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, who certainly understood a couple things about the precarious state of love in the post-WWII Occident. Of course, what most of the films Noé pays tribute to have in common is that they take a look at the darker side of sexuality, which is somewhat ironic considering Love is quite sexually banal, even if it features the novelty of a 3-D cumshot gloriously exploding on the screen. Notably, in his official Director's Note, which he signed ‘Gaspar Julio Noé Murphy’ (which is a combination of four of the characters names), the filmmaker stated, “Of all my films, this one is closest to what I have been able to know of existence, and also the most melancholic. And it gives me a lot of pleasure to be able to share this short tunnel of joys and ecstasies, accidents and mistakes.” Additionally, in an interview with Vulture.com, the filmmaker described Love as “my first first-degree movie” and “the closest thing I know to life, and the most personal.” Undoubtedly, there is no doubt in my mind that Noé was telling the truth when he described it as his most innately intimate and personal film, thus confirming my suspicion that, not unlike his hero Kubrick, his talents lie in the technical aspects of filmmaking and not in being a highly personal ‘auteur.’ Surely it is somewhat strange and ironic that Noé—a man whose parents fled from Argentina to France in the 1960s because, as the director stated in an interview with Dazed Digital, “they didn’t want to end up in a torture camp”—is at his greatest when making ‘fascistoid’ films featuring Aryan butchers stabbing swarthy Arabs like in Carne (1991) and a man literally bashing in the brains of a sick sadistic faggot that tried to rape his friend like in Irréversible (hilariously, Hebraic film critic David Edelstein once wrote, “IRREVERSIBLE might be the most homophobic movie ever made”).  Surely, no one would dare to describe Love as ‘fascistic’ or ‘homophobic.’  In my opinion, Noé's previous films, especially his first two features, are more patently potent than his latest effort because they are visceral and unadulterated expressions of the sort of the natural instincts that his commie parents probably attempted to suppress whereas Love just depicts various forms of soulless debauchery that he and/or his friends have engaged in.  Of course, the last thing that Europa (and especially France) needs is more expressions of senseless celluloid sensuality featuring sexually intemperate emotional cripples.

Despite being somewhat like the cinematic equivalent of a sometimes redundant 135-minute fuck session that concludes with a badly botched orgasm where a weak wad of cum drizzles out of your urethra like liquid emerging from a half-clogged eyedropper, Love does feature some simple truths about love and relationships as reflected in its depiction of unflattering irrational behavior and simple remarks from the hapless protagonist like, “Sex when you’re in love is the best thing.” Indeed, while you can certainly enjoy sex with people who you could care less about, nothing beats the truly transcendental highs of being in a relationship with someone that you both love and are completely sexually compatible with, but of course when things get bad, the lows are equally intense, hence why the protagonist of the film thinks to himself at one point, “How can something so wonderful…bring such great pain? Maybe it’s better to never love at all.”  While I would much rather re-watch Love over its sort of cuck-certified pseudo-intellectual American equivalent Before Sunrise (1995) directed by Richard Linklater, I cannot help but feel that Noé's film is a hastily cinematic work that had the potential to be great but is just too damn superficial and pointlessly long, as a film padded with plodding pornography and pointless dialogue, among other things.  Undoubtedly, if I am feeling in the mood to watch an idiosyncratic art-porn epic, I would much rather re-watch Curt McDowell's 160-minute piece of mirthfully macabre Gothic melodramatic sexual dysfunction Thundercrack! (1975).  As the cinematic works of auteur pornographers like Radley Metzger (The Image, The Opening of Misty Beethoven) and Lasse Braun (Body Love, French Blue) surely demonstrate, sensitively stylized artful pornography is nothing new, but of course Noé is well aware of this as demonstrated by his quoting of porn chic era works like the Mitchell Brothers' Behind the Green Door (1972) and Weston's The Defiance of Good (on top of that, he is proud collector of literary erotica). Additionally, the nihilistic hardcore flicks of Roger Watkins like Her Name Was Lisa (1980), Corruption (1983), and Midnight Heat (1983) make Love like child's play in terms of sheer darkness and grittiness.  As someone that believes that, in rare causes, certain forms of pornographhy can be culturally redeeming and artistically merited in a sort of viscerally transgressive fashion, I have to admit that Noé's film left me somewhat cold and less than impressed and I say that as someone that was genuinely excited about seeing it.  Still, in our degenerate post-counterculture age of soulless sex and mindless promiscuity, Love is somewhat important as a cinematic work that essentially tells a timeless tale as a sort of modern equivalent to classic ancient myths like Tristan and Isolde and Orpheus and Eurydice where it is demonstrated that love and sexual compatibility are not always enough to sustain a healthy relationship.  Indeed, Noé's film might be shallow in certain senses, but it holds more intrinsic truths than both Lars von Trier's Nymph()maniac (2013) and Blue Is the Warmest Colour combined. Also, unlike von Trier, Noé at least has the gall to show off his own erect cock in the film (when asked in an interview with Vulture.com about this, the auteur humorously replied, “When you make a movie, it’s like playing a game. It’s kind of funny to show your dick to everybody in the country.”).  While one could argue that flashing his blue-veined custard chucker is symbolic evidence of Noé's propensity towards long-winded artistic masturbation, it is certainly better to be a shameless onanist than a passive and clinical voyeur like von Trier and especially Kechiche.  Although largely a one-note wonder of cinematic wantonness, Love unequivocally demonstrates that Noé completely empathizes with poor lovelorn losers who have an undying craving for a warm cunt that they were quite familiar with at one point in their life, which is a sentiment that any hot-blooded male can identify with.  Indeed, I can undoubtedly think of at least one certain otherworldly hole that I would love to jump into right now.

-Ty E