"What was it that Douglas Sirk said to Fassbinder -- to make a good melodrama you need sperm, blood and tears. These are in this film."
+
selected quotes from matthew barney and gasper noé conversation (http://bombmagazine.org/article/10019/matthew-barney-and-gaspar-no)
QuoteMatthew Barney I'm curious about what you've been doing since Enter the Void. What are you up to right now?
Gaspar Noé I've been slowly preparing my next movie, which is a very sentimental erotic film. So I'm meeting kids—girls and boys—and I will continue for quite some time. In the end it will be a very, very naturalistic love story, even if the style is not going to be naturalistic. It will be a love story seen from a sexual point of view.
MB Is it a coming-of-age story? How young are the kids?
GN No, I get bored by coming-of-age stories because they make a big deal out of something that is finally not so big. Mostly, the real passion comes after that, when boys and girls are nineteen or twenty and want to try everything and get lost in all the temptations.
MB Is it a New York-based story?
GN No, it's based in Paris. But the main character is going to be an American, Canadian, or British film student, so I can see the story from his point of view and then add a voice-over in English to the character. It will be a kind of international movie but shot in France.
QuoteMB Exactly. I'm thinking now again about Enter the Void and how there's a level of artificiality in that film—the aerial perspectives over the city, for example, or the sex scene where the people's genitals are lit up, glowing with phosphorescent light. There's an artifice in that film that is so different from Irreversible, and I'm curious if your next project is heading deeper into that direction.
GN It is going to be very artificial but in more of a Godardian direction. It's going to contain a lot of words—maybe because my last film was very visual. The next one is also going to be almost silent as its scenes are being filmed, but during the editing I will add a lot of text-over and voice-over. It's going to be a more brainiac exercise, I guess.
gotta get more facts about this movie because only today did i learn it's 3d. who shot it?? i have questions. there will be articles after cannes
Benoit Debie, so says IMDB. Which makes sense.
Also: awesome conversation.
Alchemy Confirms Gaspar Noé's 'Love' Deal – Cannes
via Deadline
Alchemy has confirmed yesterday's news that it acquired U.S. rights to Gaspar Noé's latest, Love. The sexual melodrama has a Midnight Screening berth here in Cannes on Wednesday. In 3D, it stars Karl Glusman, Aomi Muyock and Klara Kristin. Noé is best known to worldwide audiences for 2002's controversial Irreversible; he was last in Cannes in 2012 with Un Certain Regard omnibus 7 Days In Havana.
Love's story follows a man over the course of a long rainy day as he reminisces about the greatest love affair of his life; a burning passion full of promises, games, excesses and mistakes. It's alternately been billed as a love story about a boy and a girl and another girl that celebrates sex in a joyous way. Alchemy's Jeff Deutchman, brokered the deal with Carole Baraton of Wild Bunch and CAA.
First clip (https://vimeo.com/128288626)
do not show that trailer to your girlfriend under any circumstance!
:sleeping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOKn33-q4Ao
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im totally gonna start calling him julio murphy
his director's note is so far my favorite film of the year
That's quite a statement, and if if anyone can deliver on such a statement it's Gasper Noe. I'm so eagerly looking forward to this one.
Quote from: The Ultimate Badass on May 24, 2015, 12:29:54 AM
That's quite a statement, and if if anyone can deliver on such a statement itsJulio Murphy. I'm so eagerly looking forward to this one.
It would be interesting to compare the on-set experience of Love vs. Blue Is the Warmest Color. The actresses seem to have a lot of genuine affection for Noe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voqi6PxjkSM
Also I didn't realize he was so silly.
so, i wish i could tell a great story about the midnight premiere of LOVE at Cannes just because I know everyone here has to be interested in this... about how it's undeniably my favorite of his films... how it's still trying to rummage itself to fit somewhere in my mind ()... all i can say is that at around 3:30am after the screening Gaspar Noe with his yellow jacket lead an intimate caravan of anyone wide-awake after the screening along with the entire cast/crew through the empty streets of Cannes, obviously leading to a welcoming night-club where he met up with his mother and father with kisses who were reaching the tail end of their 80s... It hadn't rained for both weeks of the festival, but around this particular moment the first drops began to fall... and three hours later I was on a rainy train ride back to Paris on a flight back to california...haunted and elated as hell by this movie.
I'm still not sure how the film is gonna hold up in any other setting than the way I saw it, with Gaspar Noe sitting literally 8 seats to my right (you'll understand why this is even more poignant once you see the movie), and Benoit Debie (again) 2 seats beside me, Benicio Del toro a few rows behind them-- with every entitled movie-land person in the audience wearing these ridiculous electric red 3d glasses in the middle of the night, on basically the greatest digital projection there is... at the Cannes Grand Lumiere...
wheeww shit, okay yeah i tried
Theatrical on November 6, 2015
watching/listening to Waters in his orange jacket, thanks for that, and there's the best trailer of the day no question [edit: calling something the best is always funny to me and i was going for a sassy soldier vibe in regards to today's other popular trailer]
Blu-ray (http://www.amazon.com/Love-Blu-ray/dp/B0161TTG4O?SubscriptionId=AKIAIY4YSQJMFDJATNBA&tag=bluray-012-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0161TTG4O&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER) on January 5, 2016
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8PM - TUE NOV 03, 2015
$20 - THE THEATRE AT ACE HOTEL, LOS ANGELES
Gaspar Noé in conversation with Elvis Mitchell following the screening.
The film will open in New York on October 30, followed by LA and other select markets on November 6.
guessing if i'll miss this: yeah i'm guessing i'll miss it :(
The tongues look like overcooked carrots.
Bizarre Love Triangle: Gaspar Noé on Love
By Whitney Mallett
October 28, 2015
via Filmmaker Magazine
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A threesome in 3-D and unsimulated sex in a simulated cinematic hyper-reality: that's what Gaspar Noé's latest film Love has been promising for months. At Cannes in 2014, producer Vincent Maraval teased audiences with explicit promo materials, pledging plenty of penis, nipple and onscreen ejaculate. While the film has all three in abundance, it turns out Love is more about loss than sex.
The surprisingly sentimental tale begins with Murphy (Karl Glusman) receiving a desperate voicemail message from an ex's mother. Murphy's an American in Paris with a French girlfriend, crying baby and New Year's Day hangover — a trifecta about which he's pissed right now, according to his inner monologue, transmitted to us via an atonal voiceover and which more than hints at his blundering selfishness. Vexed by the phone message, Murphy begins to reminisce about his former flame Electra (Aomi Muyock). Through an achronological narrative structure, we start to learn the sordid series of events that lost him the love of his life and saddled him with another woman and child, not to mention that potentially drove the first woman to some self-destructive end.
The film is tender and tame compared to Noé's previous work, lacking his characteristic carnage, but it's by no means a total break in form. Love, like his other films, is heavily stylized and technically nimble: the roving camera stalks its characters like in Enter the Void and events are temporally disordered like in Irreversible. Noé's bold visual language is heightened by his use of 3-D, especially in sex scenes shot from hovering angles and Paris street scenes that evoke a sense of tunnel vision.
The film twists and turns back through Murphy's relationship with Electra. The dramatic break-up when she spits in his face comes before we learn exactly what happened to cause the rift, while a post-break-up altercation at a nightclub makes more sense later when we understand how codependent the two had become. Somewhere along the way, a lithe blonde girl moves into the couple's apartment building. Of course, we already recognize Omi (Klara Kristin) from the beginning of the film — she's the woman Murphy lives with in the present, the mother of his child, but now the backstory is revealed. Murphy and Electra court a young Omi over dinner, culminating in the three making love scored by Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" in one of the film's most memorable scenes. But later Murphy sleeps with her again alone when Electra is out of town. The condom breaks.
The child from that fateful afternoon in the film is named Gaspar. These tongue-in-cheek nods the director makes to himself are hard to ignore. He also borrows his last name, Noé, for the character of an art gallery owner and dons a wig to play him. Murphy's character too seems to reference Noé, styled in the same plaid flannel shirts unbuttoned over Cinemetal T-shirts and with similar film-directing ambitions. In one particularly meta-moment, Murphy even pontificates drunkenly at a party about wanting to produce "a movie that truly depicts sentimental sexuality," to make cinema out of "blood, sweat and semen."
At the Toronto International Film Festival, I spoke with Noé about the challenges of working in 3-D, his mother's death and acquiescing to perform the role of the French pervert. Love is in theaters Oct. 30.
In an interview you mentioned wanting to direct a 3-D point-of-view film several years back, but I also heard that you'd been wanting to make a melodramatic porno for a while. When did these ideas merge?
The 3-D thing came later. The first draft I had of this script was written before I shot Irreversible. I proposed that short script to Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, who were in Irreversible. They said, "Oh, yeah, we'd be happy to do an erotic melodrama." We got financing from Canal+ to do that movie, although they hadn't read the five-page script at the time. Bellucci and Cassel were very famous — they were the golden couple of the French cinema. It was liking going to movie financiers with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise doing an erotic melodrama: "Okay, it's financed. Go ahead."
But, when Canal+ read the script, they said, "No, no, we're not going to make it." And I immediately came with this other idea of doing a great kind of revenge movie told backwards. And they accepted it. We did Irreversible, it was commercially successful, so then I could do Enter the Void. And then, after doing Enter the Void, I still wanted to do this erotic melodrama. But I said it was a pornographic melodrama. Vincent Maraval from Wild Bunch, who was selling the project, [thought] saying "pornographic" made it sound sexier. "Erotic" compared to "pornographic" seems softened down.
Once Enter the Void was finished, Avatar had just come out. So Maraval made this announcement that my next movie was going to be "a 3-D porn melodrama," but it was kind of a joke just to make people look at the movie. But it didn't really help to get the financing because I carried this image of being a filmmaker who makes violent movies, so if you add the word "pornography" to the words "extreme violence," most people were very afraid of putting money into it. This movie, though, in the end, has no violence besides some verbal violence when [the couple] becomes jealous and start insulting each other.
So, for me, the announcement [that] my next movie was going to be in 3-D was just a joke. What happened, though, is that I started to take photos in 3-D with a small 3-D negative film set camera I had.
Like the kind Murphy uses in the film?
Yes. The camera that you see in the movie, those are the kind of photos I was doing of my family and friends for many years. Three years ago, for maybe $600, I bought this home-video 3-D camera that you can only see on a 3-D screen, so I had to buy a 3-D screen also to check those images. And it happened that my mother got very sick. She was in Argentina, and she died after six months of a mental disease. And when people you love are dying and you don't see them, you want to keep images of them. So I filmed her a lot with this 3-D camera.
When I was watching those images when I was back in Paris, I saw the images had something that was really shocking because of the fact of seeing your mother inside a TV screen, but with some depth of field. It felt like she was inside this small box. It was something that was far more real than a 2-D image but also totally artificial and unreal. It was kind of moving and scary. And at that point, I thought, "Maybe I should try to do my next project as one that also deals with the intimacy of a couple in 3-D because it is going to add some weirdness, but also a lot of emotion."
I thought, though, that it would be impossible technically and financially. I thought 3-D was very expensive, mainly because it was linked in my eyes to big 3-D action movies. But my cinematographer, Benoît Debie, who worked with me on Enter the Void and Irreversible, he did a movie with Wim Wenders starring James Franco [Every Thing Will Be Fine] that was shot in 3-D. He told me, "Oh, it's not so difficult to shoot in 3-D, especially if you shoot it with the RED carbon cameras that are very small. You should try."
Two months before shooting the movie, I also ran into this guy in France who is a 3-D technician. He said, "You can get subsidies from the French government to do movies in 3-D. They give you all the money to pay the additional expenses." So the budget of the movie was maybe 2.2 million Euros and we needed a bit more than 300,000 Euros to pay the difference between a 2-D movie and a 3-D movie. We applied to that subsidy, and we got the money.
I knew that if I was doing the movie in 3-D, I should not do any handheld camera because it's nauseating. That only movements that I really like in other directors' 3-D movies were the ones that go not side to side but forward and back.
Those shots almost feel like moving through a tunnel.
How [do] you call that? Traveling in the depths? So I rewrote how I would cover the scenes that way. And we found a very small crane that we could put in the room where I was going to shoot all of the nude scenes. And then, we made the movie like that in 3-D. It was time-consuming to do the 3-D, but I'm really happy with the effect.
How different is it shooting in 3-D? How is it more time consuming?
The two cameras that you use are tiny cameras, but they're inside a box with a mirror. The position of the cameras has to be checked — the slight difference between the point of view of each camera has to be the distance between the two eyes. And because you have two cameras, you have to calibrate them to match. The color grading, the grain and everything has to be the same. The 3-D technician was taking almost two hours every morning to fix the cameras for the day. And because we were shooting inside the guild system, the shooting day was eight hours long, or nine hours, so it would take maybe 15 to 20 percent of the day.
Once we started shooting, I would not cut the camera. I would film over and over without cutting so no one would get in the room. I would just say, "Okay, this is number one. Okay, let's do a second take. Let's do a third take. Let's do a fourth take. Don't cut the camera." And then, at the end, I had shots that were maybe 15 minutes long with 10 or 20 different versions inside.
Because if you cut the camera, what would happen?
People take a break, but also, all the rest of the crew that was on the other side of the door opens the door and they all get into the set. Everybody wants to go to pee or everybody has something to say. And then, like, it takes half an hour to get rid of all the people in the room to do more takes.
The sex scenes are shot from a very particular angle. How were they shot?
For the nude scenes, we mostly shot them the first week of the five weeks shooting. For one week, we had two camera systems, meaning we had four cameras. So the nude scenes we could shoot from two different angles, and then in the editing room, I would pick out my favorite angles. One camera system was on a tripod, and the other one was on a crane. That's why those scenes on the bed are mostly from one side of the bed or from above.
Could you talk a bit about the film's visual language, about having little lateral movement but more movement into space?
Well, ultimately, it's mostly because I'm a big Kubrick fan. One day, I saw this edit made of all the shots of his movies. You see that almost all of the takes he did were either still images of big spaces or moments [that] follow into or move away from the characters. So I said, "Oh, maybe I should use that language also for this 3-D movie."
And so, you've had this idea, this rough script, for a long time. How do you keep sustained interest and be excited about the story for so long?
The story stayed interesting because I know the situations. I've been in similar situations, although the names are not the same, and I never got a girl pregnant. But the clothes that the main character wears, the posters he has in his room are the same. I said, "I want to do a movie in which I talk about what love seems to me." I was creating a world that was mine. Also, I have friends who've got girls accidentally pregnant, and from the outside, I saw how much it changed their lives.
Then, [shooting] 3-D really excited me because it was like getting into a new game that I hadn't played before. I felt like a kid operating a new toy. And I would say there's something about Karl and Aomi that made me feel safe as a director. Plus Klara, plus my usual cinematographer, Benoît Debie, it made me feel like I was home. And you know something? Sometimes you feel the energy is sunny. It's like the wind changes and it feels like now everything is almost perfect and we can have fun. You can tell, when you see the results, that the people had fun creating those images.
You had this story in mind before, and then you returned to it many years later. Did you find you were looking at it in a different way?
The main thing that changed was the mood of the movie. I first wrote it in a moment of my life in which I had never been confronted with death. And then the fact of seeing my mother's death — since losing someone, I have a more tragic sense of time. Death is a world that cannot be removed. It did not change the script, but maybe it changed my perception of the script and my use of images and music. The movie is more melancholic than it would've been if I had shot it 10 years before. There's a sense of tragedy that comes through, not only from the actors and the images and the story, but also from the use of the soundtrack. I think maybe it appeals to people who are over 25 and 30, more than to the people who are 15 or 20 that might want to see the movie.
Do you think, as you get older, you'll want to create stories that are not about young twentysomethings?
You know what? When I saw Michael Haneke's movie Amour, I was very scared. When that movie was announced and it was going to Cannes, I said, "Oh, shit, he stole my title." But then the movie was released in the whole world, even in the English-speaking territories, with the French title. So the title that I had in mind for my movie, Love, I could keep it, because Amour was worldwide as Amour and not as Love. Mine is going to be released worldwide as Love and not as Amour.
But when I saw that movie, my mother was in the middle of her agony process, and we wished that these things could go faster because she was suffering a lot. When I saw the movie, I said, "Wow, how does it come that no one ever did a movie about that subject?" It's a subject that touches maybe one family out of two during their lifetime. I'd seen people losing control of their brain, of their body, suffering. These are moments of big pain and also, I'd say, a big understanding of the human experience. That's a movie, if it hadn't been done, and someone today would bring me a plot about an old man taking care of his old wife in such a way, I would love to shoot such a movie.
Do you feel pressure to live up to this idea people have of you as an enfant terrible or provocateur?
It's too easy to provoke people. It all depends if you know what you want to put on the screen and why you want to put those things on the screen. You're mostly keeping the door open for what started in the '70s. Deliverance and Taxi Driver, in terms of violence, nothing has topped those movies since.
I never felt provocative besides maybe the length of the rape scene in Irreversible. But if people want to call you a provocateur or enfant terrible — and I don't know why they always use French words to say that — I say I can play the French pervert in the room. If you're looking to say, who's the French pervert in the room, okay, I'll play the part. But from the inside, I don't think I relate to those words, especially in this film. It's more like I'm just trying to be honest.
Yeah, it's very sentimental, and there's no violence.
I was more surprised by the reactions I got with this movie than with reactions from any movie before. I just noticed how much sexuality affects people in a psychotic way. Serious newspapers, like the Le Figaro, were saying, "No, this is not a movie. This is just obscenity." People turned against the movie because, maybe, they felt in danger because you see the erect penis of a handsome young American boy.
You mentioned before there are lots of autobiographical details of yourself in the film.
Honestly, it's more the context. I know that space. I know those kinds of people. I am these kinds of people. I know a girl who's a painter, a guy who's a film student. They're young. They do drugs. They party in the clubs where I used to party. They like the movies and books that I like. But they're open-minded, and it's very common that inside a relationship, a heterosexual couple says, "What can we do to not to be a monogamist couple? Let's bring a girl in, and let's have fun, but this is just for one night and not for two. Let's refresh our love story by showing ourselves how open we are." But then, the freedoms are funny. If they turn into a relationship, it becomes very complicated.
But there are explicit references, like, your name is in the movie, and your friends and you are playing small parts.
Instead of getting actors, I put my best friends in the movie. My cinematographer plays the shaman who steals the first girlfriend. My producer, my beloved connoisseur producer Vincent Maraval, I added those scenes of him playing a cop — a cop who wants to bring the young Murphy to a swingers club. I felt safe by putting all the people I like the most inside the movie. And also, I felt at home using for almost all of the characters' names that were coming from my family or even from myself. My whole name is Gaspar Julio Noé Murphy. Murphy's my mother's name. So when I was a kid and my parents were living in New York, and then moved back to Argentina, I would tell my friends, "My name's Gaspar Murphy." It sounded better to my ears than Gaspar Noé. So, I related to Murphy, but also, I liked that this guy called Murphy was in conflict with his son Gaspar, with his best friend, Julio, and with Noé, who is a gallery owner, who I play. I was not supposed to play in the movie, but it was a last-moment decision. The moment I bought a wig and I glued it on, I said, "Oh, it's funny to have myself with a wig."
In literature, a lot of people make novels that are inspired by their lives in an open way, or write fake stories and pretend they're true. But in cinema, maybe the one who most made movies that were kind of personal was Truffaut. He was always using Jean-Pierre Léaud, who looked a bit like him when he was young. That character was like his alter ego. It was a way of talking about himself or about life in general, as he knew it, through someone else.
But having all these characters in conflict with each other all named after you, is that suggesting something?
The man who plays the shaman who steals the first girlfriend of Murphy is called Luis and that's my father's name. And when the guy cheats on his girlfriend, he cheats on her with a girl called Paula, and Paula is my sister's name. So when my sister sees the movie, she says, "Well, what do you mean by all that?" I say, "Don't try to find any sense." It's just like if you played dice with the names. You distribute the names to any character without any particular significance.
Why did you want to make Murphy's character American?
I wanted the movie to be all in English because if the movie's in English, you can watch it without subtitles, if you speak English. I don't like the subtitles on a 3-D screen. Subtitles kill that strange intimacy that the 3-D creates.
It's maybe also because I was raised in France since I'm 13, but I don't feel French. I like the French culture. I love being in Paris. I love the French cinema, but I don't think the French language is more natural to me than the Spanish language that I've spoken my whole life, or the English language that I learned when I was raised in New York until the age of five.
The bad thing about making a movie in English, while being produced in France, is that you lose a lot of subsidies. Also, the TV channels give you a fourth or a fifth of the money that they would pay you if the movie was in French. So it was harder to get money because I wanted to do the movie in English. But maybe now it's going to reach a much wider audience.
And then there's that conversation Murphy has with the cop played by Maraval. The cop says, "Your idea of possession is so American."
I think Vincent Maraval improvised all of that scene. So he came with his own ideas about what a cop would tell an American guy with a pretty girlfriend. [Laughs]
In an interview you said you liked this porn movie from the '70s that had a really strong narrative. Defiance of the Good?
Yeah, have you seen it?
I haven't.
You should.
What's it about?
It's about a teenager, a pretty teenager, with her schoolmate, another girl. They're in her room with teddy bears and they do coke. And the parents are around and they see the two girls doing coke, so they decide that their daughter is a drug addict and that she has to be treated. So they bring the girl to a mental hospital or some kind of mental institution. And, of course, the girl who is young and pretty is accepted, and the director of that mental institution is a real pervert, and even all of the nurse team is made up of male perverts. So instead of being treated, she becomes the object of desire for the whole hospital clinic, and she gets fucked over and over. And then, the director, to save her, tells her that there are parties, special parties — actually, they're orgies. And at the end, she's initiated to these kind of orgies and becomes, at the end, like the main goddess of them. She finds her way in the decadence. It's like a witch story as told by the Marquis de Sade; if you're good, everything goes bad, and if you misbehave and you're bad, everything succeeds. But for a porn movie of the '70s, it was extremely narrative — quite different from all the other explicit movies of the time. And, yeah, it's considered erotic. There's another one I liked at the time called Night Dreams.
Speaking of other narrative pornos from that era, the ejaculate scene in Love reminds me of that scene in Behind the Green Door.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like other films, too. The first Devil in Miss Jones was pretty good. Have you seen it?
No, is it the same director?
No, but it's a movie that came out at the same time as Behind the Green Door. First, we had Deep Throat, and then Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones were maybe the biggest successes of that film genre that has totally disappeared since.
That was like "the Golden Age of porn." So even before you thought about making a narrative porn, I guess, you had watched these kind of movies for a while?
Yeah, I was addicted to these movies as a teenager. I was addicted to all these erotic magazines. I spent so much time just watching girls naked.
And do you think there's a chance now for more of this kind of combination of porn and real narrative?
No, I think the erotic genre is vanishing. You rarely see sexy images nowadays, movies like Emmanuelle. That was a huge success of the French cinema. The only erotic images you can find nowadays are things that are made in the Larry Clark style or that are in museums, but in the end, they are not really sexy. And for sure, there are adult videos that you find by Googling just some words, but I don't think they're sexy. In many ways, the '70s and '80s were more open to images that would create a desire than nowadays.
What are you working on right now?
Nothing yet. I'm reading books in two different subjects, and, also, maybe I would like to do a documentary one of these days. I have to find a new game. If I feel I'm going to do another movie like the ones I've done before, it's not going to be fun. So which new game can I play that I haven't played?
Quote from: wilder on October 30, 2015, 01:20:26 AM
Speaking of other narrative pornos from that era, the ejaculate scene in Love reminds me of that scene in Behind the Green Door.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I like other films, too. The first Devil in Miss Jones was pretty good. Have you seen it?
No, is it the same director?
No, but it's a movie that came out at the same time as Behind the Green Door. First, we had Deep Throat, and then Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones were maybe the biggest successes of that film genre that has totally disappeared since.
That was like "the Golden Age of porn." So even before you thought about making a narrative porn, I guess, you had watched these kind of movies for a while?
Yeah, I was addicted to these movies as a teenager. I was addicted to all these erotic magazines. I spent so much time just watching girls naked.
a true story from my teens is my mother walked into my room while i was showing my friends the Wild Things sex scene, and she was like not impressed you know, so she came back into my room with her Behind the Green Door vhs.
..that explains EVERYTHING
Technically expansive, emotionally limited :/
Okay j, I'll bite. I oscillated between great appreciation for the visual style and structure of Love, and frustration and sadness for a point of view I ultimately found disappointingly immature. I wrestled with this, because I firmly believe in individuals sharing their point of view in films, and points of view being valid even if they're not "objectively" true.
The failing of Love came for me towards the end when I concluded that Noe was actually unaware of the kind of point of view he thought he was expressing. The title is a misnomer. The movie thinks it's about Love, but it's not. It's what Noe thinks is love based on what he's personally experienced, but the movie definitely isn't about love. The film is about lust and infatuation and narcissism and to a certain extent - emotional abuse. These feelings are valid, they're real, and I appreciate a movie representing them, but what I can't appreciate is a movie representing them as Love, obliviously. Murphy is a sociopath. Murphy has never felt love and doesn't know what it is. He uses the concept of love, what he minimally understands to be love, as an excuse for destructive and duplicitous behavior. He's an emotional opportunist and a manipulator at heart. He's a character blind to the psychological mechanisms driving himself, but the problem is that Noe is as well. Murphy is in pain, no doubt, but Noe effectively pardons him and his actions by the film's closing, not out of forgiveness for all his flaws, but from my point of view, because he's actually unaware of them and sees Murphy's behavior through a distorted lens.
The movie left me feeling queasy, something was wrong. It was emotionally ugly. There were miserablist scenes, to be sure, but that was to be expected and I don't necessarily have a problem with downtrodden movies. What finally bothered me on a gut level was that the portrayal of the emotions was a lie. The individual scenes feel true, and even though the actors weren't on point 100% of the time (and frequently improvising unfortunately shallow dialogue because there was only a 7 page script), I could believe them. But the omniscient gaze of the director was serving these scenes up warped. The framing of the story is misguided. I wish I could throw away the presentation of the scenes and watch them isolated from the message of the whole, but structurally Love is intrinsically tied to its premise in such a way that this is impossible to to do.
Now on to the good: The only other 3D movie I'd seen was Gravity, and from what I understand about filming in 3D you can't shoot the same way because shots don't cut completely similarly or some camera moves don't have the same effect as in two dimensions (someone correct me on this if I'm wrong). The blocking in Love was interesting because it felt uniquely tied to the new restrictions 3D imposes while simultaneously expanding film grammar related to its use. Shots like Murphy talking to his neighbor next door, shot through his neighbor's apt window to see Murphy in his own apt smaller in the background as they converse, are static but almost seem to replace the need for camera movement in a traditional movie because of the overriding depth of the shot. The structure of the movie is also impressive, a bit of Nicolas Roeg's Bad Timing combined with Noe's own inventiveness, but it's at odds with the content. I'd probably watch the movie again, in fact I'm sure I'll watch the movie again for these artful elements, but I'm fairly certain repeated viewings won't alter the callow conclusion of the film.
There's a wonderful extended shot towards the end of Murphy holding his baby in a bathtub. It was one of the only moments in Love that went into new emotional territory akin to Herzog's "ecstatic truth" and held a depth previously unseen in the scenes preceding it. Noe's method of working without a full script yields some positive cinematic results for sure, but it also seems to be a limiting factor in regards to the fleshing out of his ideas and the way they're verbally communicated through his characters.
I didn't want to write this out, I'd rather not spend energy bagging on a movie I had problems with, anymore, but I also don't want what I posted above to be misunderstood. Hope this clears things up.
I liked your review. How were the sex scenes?
They're fine, I don't feel too strongly about them either way. I think they're necessary because they illuminate the main character's point of view -- what he's actually obsessed with as opposed to love.
The movie is now available on Vimeo On Demand (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lovefeature) and Amazon Instant (https://www.amazon.com/Love-Aomi-Muyock/dp/B017HXF44O?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0)
i still have not seen this movie and continue to operate in a theoretical realm.
Quote from: wilder on November 09, 2015, 08:26:47 PM
frustration and sadness for a point of view I ultimately found disappointingly immature. I wrestled with this, because I firmly believe in individuals sharing their point of view in films, and points of view being valid even if they're not "objectively" true.
The failing of Love came for me towards the end when I concluded that Noe was actually unaware of the kind of point of view he thought he was expressing. The title is a misnomer. The movie thinks it's about Love, but it's not. It's what Noe thinks is love based on what he's personally experienced, but the movie definitely isn't about love.
except for those rare few who are born blessed, when does a person learn about love and what love means? when in high school, or around then or whenever, did you tell another person you loved them? then as the days went on, if you did not marry this person, if there was a break up, after the break up would you say you told the person a misnomer? perhaps, or perhaps you'd say the word was valid, that you did love the person, but you were young and you did not know how to love.
i wouldn't expect or want Noe to portray an ideal love happening through youth. that's not the lives most people lead.
then too, there is of course the complexity that comes with describing an ideal love, which would be another conversation, i don't think it's necessary for this conversation, but that conversation would be possible, that's chill.
QuoteThe film is about lust and infatuation and narcissism and to a certain extent - emotional abuse. These feelings are valid, they're real, and I appreciate a movie representing them, but what I can't appreciate is a movie representing them as Love, obliviously. Murphy is a sociopath. Murphy has never felt love and doesn't know what it is. He uses the concept of love, what he minimally understands to be love, as an excuse for destructive and duplicitous behavior. He's an emotional opportunist and a manipulator at heart. He's a character blind to the psychological mechanisms driving himself, but the problem is that Noe is as well. Murphy is in pain, no doubt, but Noe effectively pardons him and his actions by the film's closing, not out of forgiveness for all his flaws, but from my point of view, because he's actually unaware of them and sees Murphy's behavior through a distorted lens.
there's a kind of parallel, between you seeing this movie and carrying with you your ideal of love and wanting to find it but not, and the character saying love but his actions not finding meaning. he's on the screen and you're on the seat, that's all.
QuoteThe movie left me feeling queasy, something was wrong. It was emotionally ugly. There were miserablist scenes, to be sure, but that was to be expected and I don't necessarily have a problem with downtrodden movies. What finally bothered me on a gut level was that the portrayal of the emotions was a lie. The individual scenes feel true, and even though the actors weren't on point 100% of the time (and frequently improvising unfortunately shallow dialogue because there was only a 7 page script), I could believe them. But the omniscient gaze of the director was serving these scenes up warped. The framing of the story is misguided. I wish I could throw away the presentation of the scenes and watch them isolated from the message of the whole, but structurally Love is intrinsically tied to its premise in such a way that this is impossible to to do.
i wouldn't like that feeling either, and i can't respond to this without having seen the movie. i need to witness the framing myself.
QuoteI didn't want to write this out, I'd rather not spend energy bagging on a movie I had problems with, anymore, but I also don't want what I posted above to be misunderstood. Hope this clears things up.
xx. i need to see the movie, you know, but more aware of your thoughts now i look forward to seeing the movie more. i mean just of course eventually i'll see this.
Quote from: jenkins<3 on November 10, 2015, 02:02:12 AM
i still have not seen this movie and continue to operate in a theoretical realm.
I'll respond to a few things but yeah let's save this conversation for later...
Quoteexcept for those rare few who are born blessed, when does a person learn about love and what love means? when in high school, or around then or whenever, did you tell another person you loved them? then as the days went on, if you did not marry this person, if there was a break up, after the break up would you say you told the person a misnomer? perhaps, or perhaps you'd say the word was valid, that you did love the person, but you were young and you did not know how to love.
If the movie were operating from that perspective it'd be fine, but I don't think it is. And I don't think you learn about love until you're really in it, at least I didn't. Having been in love, this did not seem like love to me.
Quotei wouldn't expect or want Noe to portray an ideal love happening through youth. that's not the lives most people lead.
Love is never ideal and always messy. But I still don't see love in Love.
Quotethere's a kind of parallel, between you seeing this movie and carrying with you your ideal of love and wanting to find it but not, and the character saying love but his actions not finding meaning. he's on the screen and you're on the seat, that's all.
You're assuming I'm carrying in some concept of 'ideal love' with me, which I'm not. If anything from my own point of view love definitely brings pain.
i need to learn the framing device
Quote from: jenkins<3i need to learn the framing device.
Mild spoilersThe film utilizes a flashback/flash-forward structure, implying a certain relationship is definitely love. That's basically it.
Edit - shit jenk I accidentally edited your post instead of replying. Apologies. Maybe admins can undo this?
Quote from: wilder on November 10, 2015, 02:40:21 AMEdit - shit jenk I accidentally edited your post instead of replying. Apologies. Maybe admins can undo this?
There's no way to undo it. I have definitely done that at least a few times. Stupid modify button is right next to the quote button.
SPOILERS
I think something missing in this discussion is the concept of love Noe is even talking about. In interviews, he distances himself from a lot of the content of the film and says it speaks to ideas of his past. Things he not only experienced but situations and perspectives he feels distant from. The couple is narcissistic and the protagonist is certainly riddled with problems. Even when he's looking back and lamenting on what he lost, he's bitten by anger and anxiety that doesn't feel matured. He still has issues and can't appreciate what he has. If he had to timeline the actual distance from when he was last with Electra, it can't be more than 2-4 years (given the age of his child). Wouldn't he still be in his likely 20s? I think a lot of the film is the frustrations of being in love when you're younger and what you feel is more passionate than dedicated. Murphy proudly pronounces his ambition in film like any idealist but he doesn't seem too removed (time wise) from that situation.
More to the point, I think Love is about the concept of a broken version of it (I kept thinking about someone telling me relationships can be good, but never pleasant) and how a couple tries to break through their problems by devolving their relationship to dares of sexual lust and how a simple mistake (impregnating another girl) forever fractures what they had. Having children with Electra is what Murphy seemingly wanted, but it happened with the wrong person. Did it really happen with the wrong person? Would Murphy had been different with Electra? Who knows, because the audience has to tunnel vision their experience and information based on what Murphy says and remembers. He's trying to come to terms at the end, but he's too fractured to really do so. It's the point of first person perspective. It isn't suppose to be about clear ideas and the vagueness of the title certainly makes it apt for criticism, but for Murphy (our sole real entity in the film), this idea of Love is all he knows and may ever know. We don't know. But Noe always likes to delve into mindsets and worlds and keep the audience away from the happy distance of third person storytelling. He always wants disruption and everyone sitting in the first row for it.
SPOILERSQuote from: Gold Trumpet on November 10, 2015, 06:43:56 PM
a lot of the film is the frustrations of being in love when you're younger and what you feel is more passionate than dedicated.
I like your angle on this, but disagree about the source of the feelings...
Quote from: Gold Trumpet on November 10, 2015, 06:43:56 PMWould Murphy have been different with Electra?
This is a great question, maybe the key question, but I think we see evidence of the eventuality of their relationship in many scenes. At the party, Murphy fucks another girl in the bathroom right under the nose of his girlfriend, then lies about it to her face. Later, in the sex club, she has to physically pull him away from another girl and force him to be with her. The end result of this scene is a sort of test of Murphy, when Electra is pleasuring another guy while Murphy pleasures her. And then he blows up in the car about it. Murphy previously wanted an open relationship and was cool to go through with it in f-m-f terms, but when it came to Electra's pleasure he backpedaled. He wants possession without dedication but has a double-standard when she eventually turns the tables on him and proposes a m-f-m three-way. The difference in Murphy's relationship with Electra is only that he doesn't have chains (a baby) committing him to her, and that frees him in a way that deludes him into believing it's love. This makes total psychological sense, but it's also an example of Murphy being misogynistic and never putting Electra first. Electra's feelings are always an afterthought for him. Only when he's personally affected in a negative way that could get
him in trouble does he think of her. If one of the defining features of love is selflessness, then Murphy fails on all fronts. He was never in it at all.
Quote from: Gold Trumpet on November 10, 2015, 06:43:56 PMHe's trying to come to terms at the end, but he's too fractured to really do so. It's the point of first person perspective. [...] Noe always likes to delve into mindsets and worlds and keep the audience away from the happy distance of third person storytelling.
I'm with you there, but if the movie is trying to put us in Murphy's shoes then we should also feel the love he thinks he has. And I'm also not convinced the movie is entirely first-person perspective free from any comment the structure imposes.
just realized, oh, it played twice in three days at the Aero, once at Ace, and i think that might've been it, and i missed this...
^ It's at Laemmle's Playhouse (https://www.laemmle.com/films/40130) today and tomorrow but in 2D
i'm going to miss those too... you know what i'm doing today wilder... omg that reminds me btw... but thanks for telling me and it gives me hope for seeing it in my future.
to summarize the situation: this movie was made for 3d, but 3d screens across the city are filled by movies that make money, there's like an inverse correlation between this movie's excitement factor and its money potential, so my best hope is that people like it enough to bring it around to more 2d screens, but basically i already missed the boat on seeing this movie the way it was intended to be seen, since i thought it'd keep playing and playing at the Aero when i imagined.
I bailed from this after 70 minutes. Fucking horrendous. Reminded me of To the Wonder the most in that it's such a self-parody of the auteur's style and id that it feels like it was penned by a spiteful enemy. Genuinely embarassing. I almost cringed myself inside out at the 'Gaspar' and 'Noe' naming references. Avoid. Hate.
About 69 Love Songs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD7u9caifzM), Stephin Merritt told The Independent --
"69 Love Songs is not remotely an album about love, it's an album about love songs, which are very far away from anything to do with love."
I'm very interested by wilder's perspective that this film is not about Love. Obviously the expression or pov on Love is subjective. Isn't it? I'm not certain, but maybe even Noe would agree that this is not a film about love but about love-acts. Love-lies, love-distortions, love-mistook. I don't think wilder iz off-base to say this is about infatuation and
lust, and perhaps they're branches off the same trunk for Noe.
We can fall in love with liminal distance between what we want and what we've got...
Wanted to include Merritt's quote, the album, and this poem from Elaine Kahn's
Romance or the End.
QuoteTHERE IS NOTHING MORE TO LIFE THAN THIS
Sickness
is a kind of clarity
It makes you feel afraid
and love to be alive
It interests me
to be afraid
My claim is on the absolute
I never wanted
to be free
Only to be
nothing
And to love
to be alive
Just like the French
my beauty’s nourished
by its own disgrace
I love
when it’s disgusting
Jealously
I wash myself
The sacrament of being
held without affection
My only purity
is in my failure
to be satisfied
We will never comprehend this
nor what hinders you
The horror I confess
I cannot have you
without being
and you know what I’d prefer