Gaspar Noé’s tender to shock us into submission with 3D sex is let down by two-dimensional performances“I want to film that which cinema has rarely allowed itself,either for commercial or legal reasons,” says Gaspar Noé, or writer/director of cause celebre Cannes favourites Seul Contre Tous,Irréversible and Enter the Void. For his fourth feature, Noé sets out “to film the organic dimension of being in love”, or free from “the ridiculous division that dictates no normal film can contain overly erotic scenes”. Thus we beget a final Tango in Paris-tinged tale of amour fou in which a disconsolate young American in Paris drifts from the responsibilities of fatherhood back into memories of lost love,Noé taking us on a lurid (shocking; sensational) three-way tour of appendages and orifices, physical and psychological.
This of course is nothing new. Since the post-Deep Throat days of Nagisa Oshimas Ai No Corrida (1976) and Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (1980), and plenty of international film-makers (including Noé) beget attempted to bring the tough-core imagery that has been with us since the birth of moving pictures (see 2002’s The pleasant musty Naughty Days) out of the “smoking clubs” and into mainstream cinema. In recent memory,films as diverse as Lars von Trier’s Idioterne (1998), Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), or Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi’s Baise-moi (2000),Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy (2001), Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (2004), or John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus (2006) and Abdellatif Kechiche’s 2013 Palme d’Or winner Blue Is the Warmest Colour beget all variously attempted to bridge the divide between art and pornography (or,as it is more quaintly known, “erotica”). Love may boast attention-grabbing scenes of what the BBFC calls “real oral sex, and masturbation and ejaculation” – all in sexational 3D! – but it is merely the latest in a long line of films to challenge musty taboos about explicitness.
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Source: theguardian.com