Love

Gaspar Noe – 2015 – France

The only things I hate more than Gaspar Noe and his ugly movies are Lars Von Trier and his ugly movies; that and the fact that I live in a world where they are considered important auteurs.  Noe’s juvenile, trendy nihilism has sucked him into a pathetic, semi-delusional mindset in which he has to pay lip service to loathing humanity whether he really does or not.  Lacking ideas and creative genius, filmmakers like him have little choice but to take the well-beaten path of pretending that manufacturing controversy is the same thing as a bold artistic statement.  We’ve been through this baloney before and I don’t feel like going into the same rap all over again; (see my review of Nymphomaniac for my opinion of filmmakers who loudly demand to be called heroes as a way of bluffing critics and audiences into not identifying them as charlatans).  Noe and his stars have been interviewed at length and almost never have a thing to say about what’s interesting about the film or why they wanted to make it.  The party line is strictly that the film is explosively groundbreaking in its frank depiction of sexuality; not because sex sells or anything as crass as that, of course, but because they are fearless artists.  Never mind that this is exactly the same strategy behind curiously similar vile and misanthropic movies that appear every few years that all boast of being unprecedented and revolutionary in blurring the lines between art and porn.  Let’s see, before Nymphomaniac there was Shortbus (2006), and before that there was 9 Songs (2004), before that Baise Moi (2000), then Romance (1999), and on and on, all the way back to In the Realm of the Senses (1976).  All of these brag of containing scenes in which actors may or may not be performing sex acts for real, a boast that has lost any significance in the age of modern special effects; the real thing or a top-of-the-line simulation would be indistinguishable, so what difference does it make?   Morally, Noe proves himself no different than the uptight prudes he pretends to be scandalizing, and just as misogynistic; his portrayal of sex is as a corrupting vice (on a par with cocaine) that, by definition, seems to boil down to mentally unstable temptresses distracting otherwise responsible men from their business as productive members of society.  Brainwashed by Noe into believing that ejaculating into the camera is a brave achievement worthy of the Nobel Prize, lead actor Karl Glusman has described himself in interviews as a “Neal Armstrong” making a giant leap for mankind into uncharted territory.  When the buzz dies down and, in another year or two, when a new film appears advertising heretofore unheard of explicit sexuality, I wonder if Glusman will realize that he has been conned and that not a soul on the planet cares about his staggering fearlessness.  Gaspar Noe is a liar and a fraud.  It was over 40 years ago that John Waters depicted the eating of dog feces on camera as well as a close-up of a pulsating anal sphincter in Pink Flamingos.  The age of shock and novelty is long over.  Waters made headlines because he showed things that had never been seen on film before, which he did with a subversive sense of humor.  Noe can make no equivalent claim.  Love is only the latest in a long line of affected and garish erotic dramas that are never remotely as sexy or trailblazing as they pretend to be.