Movie Mondays: Gaspar Noe’s LOVE

Note: as of this posting, Gaspar Noe’s LOVE is no longer available to stream, unless you’re in the UK, via Amazon.

Warning: this movie can be triggering, and I’m not sure how to put a specific on that. It’s quite sexy but the feeling it leaves you with is one of tragedy. It’s also over two hours long and I had to break up my viewing into two parts.

So I’d heard about this movie a couple of years ago, but didn’t think anything else of it. Gaspar Noe made the movie Irreversible, and that was a good movie, but one that I NEVER EVER need to watch again.

First things first, LOVE is beyond NSFW. As a matter of fact, most people would consider it pr0n, although Mr. Noe himself doesn’t think so.

Quoted from that interview:

“It’s a melancholic drama portraying lost love, and in its essence, love is mostly carnal,” Noé says. “When you fall in love, you can get into these hard-core addictions that turn you crazy and make you feel like you’ve got tunnel vision. You get stoned by love.

And then you don’t just get addicted to a person who you’ve designated as your object of desire; you get addicted to the fact of being in that mental state. I’ve heard people walking out of the movie and saying, ‘Oh, I did not get aroused by that movie. I felt like crying.’”

Here’s the trailer.

It wasn’t well-received at the box office, at all. It premiered at Cannes (out of competition) in 3-D. Yeah, the graphic sex scenes and all.

One evening a few months ago, I was sitting on the couch. Everyone had already gone to sleep and I was zoning out. When I’m left to my own devices, I rarely watch “tv”, and would rather read a book, do web stuff, or workout, or maybe even shoot sexy pictures of myself.

Not that night. I turned on Netflix and randomly browsed. Lucky me, this was one of the first movies that popped (ha, unintended pun) up. So I watched the trailer and whoa boy, I was intrigued.

This film got under my skin, in that disturbing kind of way that lingers long after the screen fades to black. Perhaps I could relate in some small ways to the anguish and heartache.

I had relationships in the past that were built on a mutual appreciation of particular substances. Some ended well, a couple of them didn’t.

A quote from Murphy (played by Karl Glusman, aka Mr. Zoe Kravitz):

“How can something so wonderful, bring such great pain?”