The Irréversible director’s highly focused sex-epic generously involves the audience in the action and boasts all the best and worst of vintage porn, but lacks the bite of his earlier work

Here is the Cannes film festival’s 51st shade of … well, not grey, because director Gaspar Noé does have a penchant for that classic red-filter lighting appropriate for full-on filth, as well as a soupy sound-design and indistinct dialogue which sounds quieter than the deafeningly loud cheesy ambient music: soft rock and even, at one moment, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Love is Noé’s explicit sex film in 3D: that is, vanilla heterosexual sex, in girl-boy and girl-girl-boy permutations (you sure can tell a straight guy made this movie) with a conscientious emphasis on condoms. There is also one scene with a transsexual, with whom our male hero totally chickens out of doing anything rude. No spanking.

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The 3D means at one stage we basically get a squelching of sperm swooshing out of the screen straight at the audience, as well as what can only be described as a nightmare penis-slit shot, rhythmically chugging in and out at us through a hideous tunnel of purple flesh big enough for Eurostar. And it often looks like the audience is going to need to duck when the male lead and his hefty phallus turns around, like Eric Sykes and his ladder. There are times when it looks like a Cinema Paradiso-type money-shot highlight showreel.

It’s hardcore, yet much softer-core than Noé’s earlier movies, without the terrifying shock factor of Irréversible and Seul Contre Tous, and without the visual brilliance of Enter the Void, and Love is preposterous and badly acted and talky in a way that porn films haven’t been since they were designed to be shown in cinemas: I was paradoxically reminded of Clive James’s memory of nervously taking his date to see Hiroshima Mon Amour and them becoming the first couple in history to see that film and not have sex afterwards.

But there is something endearing in its very monomaniacal quality: here is a film with just one subject, what Casanova called the “subject of subjects”: the subject we spend most of our time thinking about and not admitting it, and here is a film which actually shows you the sex, the thing that makes babies, as supposed to the general coy sexiness and come-on glamour that so many other films spend their time promoting.

As ever with Noé, there is a weirdly doomy air to the proceedings: Murphy (Karl Klusman) is an American in Paris, and any similarity to Gene Kelly ends there. He is lacerated with misery and regret: “A dick has one purpose: to fuck. And I fucked it all up,” he says.

Murphy is very unhappily living with his girlfriend Omi (Klara Kristin) and their young baby. It turns out that he still obsessively in love with his former girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock). Murphy and Electra had originally invited Omi to join them for a three-way and Murphy had cheated on Electra with Omi and got her pregnant. Now Murphy reflects on their passionate affair, which didn’t prevent him cheating on her, or indeed her cheating on him with her old partner, a wealthy art dealer played with a ridiculous steel-grey wig, by Noé — a Tarantino-esque cameo which the director cheerfully supplements with many more references to himself. The “Love Hotel” model from Enter the Void is seen in Murphy’s apartment, and of course Murphy’s strident views on cinema are pretty obviously Gaspar’s own.

Murphy wants to show the sperm and juices of real life in his films. He demands to know why cinema does not show people having sex who are also in love, and no-one seems to want to take him up on that claim. Surely the lead characters of Ai No Corrida are in love? And at a pinch, those of Last Tango In Paris. It is certainly true that sex scenes in films tend to show people having sex for the very first time: although Nic Roeg’s sex scene in Don’t Look Now — widely considered the greatest sex scene — depicted in its own indirect way sex between a married couple who had had sex many times before.

A detail from one of the posters

There is nothing experimental or wayward or playful in the way the sex in this film is shot: the point is just to deliver the actual business of penetration: over and over again, usually in subdued woozy light. There is a strange kind of humour in one scene. After Murphy is taken to a police station after punching Noé, he makes a bizarre claim about his interrogating officer to Electra after they are released — a claim which is to lead to a musing on the differences between the French and the Americans and the inevitable trip to a sex club.

As ever with sexually explicit films, some airy sophisticates here at Cannes are going to claim that they found Love “boring”. I guarantee it. And I can only say that like Pinocchio, their noses are growing — and leave it at that. Love is crass, and ridiculous and often uproarious. The three actors involved are not joining the RSC or giving their interpretation of Aristophanes or Miller any time soon. But Love is a raunchy vaudeville with a surreal streak of despair. That’s entertainment.