Gaspar Noé’s ‘Love’, Described As 3D Porn, Premieres At Cannes

Gaspar Noé’s Love, an art house sex film, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to lackluster reviews, many of which described Love as little more than 3D porn.

Love, Gaspar Noé’s Art House Sex Film, Gets Lackluster Reviews

Love tells the story of Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American living in Paris with his girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock) who then starts an affair with Omi (Kalra Kristin). The strange 3D film promised viewers salacious sex scenes, with Noé aiming to push the envelope of sex on screen, and, in fact, reportedly featured “a 3D image of a large penis’s sperm cascading towards the audience.” But even 3D pornographic images wasn’t enough to entertain the Cannes audience, with many viewers calling the film empty and boring.

“Since Noé proclaimed that he hoped Love would ‘give guys erections and make girls wet,’ and came with decidedly NSFW posters of ejaculating penises, the film can only be considered an abject failure,” wrote Richard Porton of The Daily Beast. (Note: other articles have quoted Noé as saying he hoped his film would “give guys erections and make girls cry.”)

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that, while not as salacious or seductive, Love succeeded in showing sex in a somewhat unromanticized version rarely seen in films. “But there is something endearing in its very monomaniacal quality: here is a film with just one subject, what Casanova called the ‘subject of subjects’: the subject we spend most of our time thinking about and not admitting it, and here is a film which actually shows you the sex, the thing that makes babies, as supposed to the general coy sexiness and come-on glamour that so many other films spend their time promoting,” Bradshaw wrote.

Putting aside the bold nudity and graphic sex scenes, another critic noted that the film was “shallow in emotional depth.”

After the premiere, Noé told reporters at Cannes that he wasn’t quite sure how to package Love, saying, “We sold the project as a mellow pornographic film. I thought it would sell like hotcakes, but then (the producer) said to me, ‘as soon as you say pornographic, people get scared.’”

Noé also remained coy as to what images in the film were real and what images were faked – in other words, when actors used prosthetic genitalia. “There’s all sorts of things in my film, some are real, some are fake,” he said.

Glusman, however, opened up about what it was like to drop his pants on the first day of shooting, saying, “Gaspar decided to start us off with a close-up of my genitals. And I was in the bathroom looking in the mirror thinking I should get to the airport and run back to the United States, that this is the end of a very short career.”