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CANNES, France — “Love,” a pornographic 3-D film by Gaspar Noé, includes scenes of penetration, mutual masturbation and a penis ejaculating in 3-D toward the audience. Nevertheless, it failed to excite critics, who roundly panned the film, or walked out of a press screening, when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival out of competition on Thursday.

“Love,” set in Paris, tells the story of Murphy (Karl Glusman), an aspiring filmmaker, and Electra (Aomi Muyock), an aspiring artist, and their relationship that unravels after a threesome with their perky neighbor, Omi (Klara Kristin). It is a classic melodrama with a lot of graphic sex. “We won’t say what’s real and what’s false. There’s lots of false,” Mr. Noé said at a news conference here Thursday.

“The movie could never have been done in America,” said Mr. Noé, 51, who was born in Argentina and raised in France. In Europe, he added, people are more “open-minded” about sex scenes. “Americans, when it comes to film distribution, can be pretty square,” he said.

Vincent Maraval, a founder of the French production and distribution company Wild Bunch, said that in the United States, the independent distributor Alchemy would release “Love” unrated in 25 theaters. Mr. Maraval said the film would also go to video-on-demand — The Hollywood Reporter noted that Alchemy has a deal to stream its films on Netflix — to avoid what he called censorship.

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“It’s because of French state money that he was able to shoot it in 3-D,” Mr. Maraval said, adding, with an expletive for effect, “I love France.”

Mr. Noé said that if it were up to him, he would allow 12-year-olds to see the film, which critics dismissed as art-house porn without much of the art house, and self-indulgently long at 2 hours and 15 minutes.

The director is known for pushing the envelope. His film “Irréversible,” which competed in 2002 at Cannes, featured a violent rape scene with Jo Prestia and Monica Bellucci. A rough cut of “Enter the Void,” set in nightclubs in Tokyo, had its premiere at Cannes in 2009.

Mr. Maraval said that Thierry Frémaux, the director of Cannes, had wanted to show “Love” during the festival after seeing a rough cut, and that Mr. Noé had been working on edits until two days before the film’s premiere.

The festival is known for showing racy, boundary-pushing films. In 2013, the lesbian sex scenes of the Palme d’Or-winning “Blue Is the Warmest Color” generated a vigorous debate. In 2002, “The Brown Bunny,” which featured a sex act between director Vincent Gallo and actress Chloë Sevigny, was panned by the critic Roger Ebert as the worst film ever shown at Cannes (though after he saw a later edit, he changed his opinion).