Gaspar Noé on how he was inspired by porn for 2015 film ‘Love’
For better or for worse, there has never been a filmmaker quite like the Argentine Gaspar Noé, who has made a name for himself by making divisive movies that utilise vibrant colours, electric soundtracks and wild visuals. More often than not, these movies force you to sweat with anxiety as they navigate the boundaries of good tastes, pushing a profound corner of filmmaking that questions the limit of the art form itself.
Indeed, every two years or so, the Argentine creative will release a film so gratuitously gory or sexual that he’ll have a queue of stuffy suits, each scoffing their way out of the Cannes Film Festival on a regular biennial basis. Though, whilst the likes of 2002s Irréversible and 2009s Enter the Void prompted mass walkouts, it would also be amiss to blindly denounce such works, with the filmmaker certainly capable of artistic greatness.
The idiosyncratic cinema of Noé certainly isn’t for everyone, but there are morsels of pure joy to be found liberally scattered throughout each and every one of his movies, most recently present in 2021s harrowing dementia drama, Vortex. The same cannot be said for his critically panned 2015 borderline porn movie Love, which was presented in 3-D seemingly just to be provocative and boast the world’s first three-dimensional cumshot.
Starring a bunch of non-professional actors, including Klara Kristi and Aomi Muyock, the divisive romantic drama told the story of an American living in Paris who enters into a deeply sexual and emotional relationship with a young woman. With little thought as to the effect of such an invitation, they convince an attractive neighbour to share their bed, leading to several complications.
Speaking to Little White Lies back in 2015, Noé discussed how the realities of sex, love, lust and porn fed into his movie. “No one ever says ‘I love you’ in porn,” the filmmaker asserted, “You never see people kissing or a woman getting pregnant or having periods – things that happen in real life. I enjoyed watching porn movies for many years but one day suddenly I stopped”.
Continuing, he adds, “I used to like watching VHS and porn movies in theatres but now pornography is all on the internet and to me the computer is the least arousing thing”.
Evidently missing the physical pleasure of sweaty magazine paper and the smog of a sleazy late-night adult cinema, Noé adds: “I grew up with ’70s pornography which had more narrative and the girls had normal boobs and they had pubic hair. It was great. French pornography was maybe a bit bourgeois, but it was much closer to real life”.
Taking perhaps a little bit too much pleasure in musing over the ins and outs of pornography, Noé finally gets to how the industry influenced his 2015 movie. “When it comes to my movie,” he explains, “I really wanted to portray a true love story so I needed to include full frontal nudity. It’s a return the erotic cinema of the ’70s which sadly doesn’t exist anymore”.
We can say with some certainty that watching Noé’s 2015 film Love will get you yearning for literally anything else less ballsy.
