Gruesome threesome is just tiresome: Love is porn that poses as art, writes BRIAN VINER 

By Brian Viner, Film Critic for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:50 EST, 19 November 2015 | Updated: 03:44 EST, 20 November 2015

Love

Verdict: Porn that poses as art

Rating:

Xamira Zuloaga and Karl Glusman star in Love by French writer-director Gaspar Noe

Xamira Zuloaga and Karl Glusman star in Love by French writer-director Gaspar Noe

When the great Alan Jay Lerner wrote An American In Paris, he certainly wasn’t thinking of Murphy, a self-absorbed student filmmaker, played, with very little discernible acting ability, by one Karl Glusman.

But that’s what Murphy is; an American in Paris, who falls for a French girl, Electra (Aomi Muyock), and proceeds to have sex with her, others, and occasionally himself, not only from every conceivable angle but also in 3D.

That’s before she walks out on him for getting the neighbour pregnant, turning him into a howling ball of self-pity. Murphy is really not a young man you’d want to spend one minute with, let alone 134 of them.

Yet Love’s French writer-director Gaspar Noe is getting far more exposure than he deserves for giving us more exposure than we could possibly want. His film is designed to shock, you see, and only to shock. Not to entertain, or even to titillate.

So we see Murphy and Electra in a threesome with the 16-year-old next door, at an orgy, and in a tryst with a transsexual.

At one point Murphy performs a sex act directly into the camera. Which in 3D is precisely as unpleasant as it sounds.

In the right context, there’s nothing wrong with graphic sexual imagery on screen. There was plenty of it in another French-made film, Blue Is The Warmest Colour, but that was a touching love story, beautifully acted. I admired Lars Von Trier’s controversial Nymphomaniac, too.

This, by contrast, is a thoroughly pretentious and tiresome feature, lumbered with a plot that makes the average porn film look like Doctor Zhivago. 

Love is a thoroughly pretentious and tiresome feature, lumbered with a plot that makes the average porn film look like Doctor Zhivago

Love is a thoroughly pretentious and tiresome feature, lumbered with a plot that makes the average porn film look like Doctor Zhivago

But instead of dwelling on the sex, let me instead pick out a scene in which the characters keep their clothes on for a change.

That was when I noticed in the background a poster for Birth Of A Nation, and for all that D.W. Griffith’s 1915 masterpiece was by modern standards full of racist ideology, I couldn’t help thinking that in precisely a century the cinema hasn’t exactly made great strides.

Not if we measure the 100-year span from mighty D.W. Griffith at one end, to limp Gaspar Noe at the other.

 

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