Can 'porn' be a good 'film'?

Can 'porn' be a good 'film'?

Love, the latest desperate provocation from director Gaspar Noe, tells the story of a torridly destructive love affair. Half the film takes place in bed, where the two lead actors have unsimulated sex, in unblinking long takes, as explicitly as the performers in a pornographic video. Noe perches his camera right over the action, so that he isn't just framing the shots: he's staring, right along with the audience.

He wants to rub our noses in the raw truth of sexuality, in the skin and sweat and passion and beauty, and how it expresses the deep mystery of a relationship.

The effect, however, is rather odd. In Love, we gawk at these characters as if they were entwined nude figures in an aquarium. Noe is so possessed by the idea that he's breaking boundaries that he doesn't let the story - or the sexuality - flow. The hardcore scenes in Love may be shocking to some, but they have almost no spontaneity or heat.

Noe is certainly an accomplished craftsman, and as he proved in the terrifyingly violent Irreversible, his fixation on the sordid underbelly of life is no sham; he goes to seamy, transgressive places that other directors don't. Yet as Noe's career has progressed, he has become an ever more grandiose and self-important film-maker, one who now views even his lead characters as pawns in a larger vision.

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