Good porn?

The BBC has an article by Owen Gleiberman about an unusual porn film:

Love, the latest desperate provocation from director Gaspar Noé, tells the story of a torridly destructive love affair. Half the film takes place in bed, where the two lead actors (photo)  have unsimulated sex, in unblinking long takes, as explicitly as the performers in a pornographic video. Noé perches his camera right over the action, so that he isn’t just framing the shots: he’s staring, right along with the audience. He wants to rub our noses in the raw truth of sexuality, in the skin and sweat and passion and beauty, and how it expresses the deep mystery of a relationship.
The effect, however, is rather odd. In Love, we gawk at these characters as if they were entwined nude figures in an aquarium. Noé is so possessed by the idea that he’s breaking boundaries that he doesn’t let the story or the sexuality flow. The hardcore scenes in Love may be shocking to some, but they have almost no spontaneity or heat.
Noé is certainly an accomplished craftsman, and as he proved in the terrifyingly violent Irreversible, his fixation on the sordid underbelly of life is no sham; he goes to seamy, transgressive places that other directors don’t. Yet, as Noé’s career has progressed, he has become an ever more grandiose and self-important film-maker, one who now views even his lead characters as pawns in a larger vision.
Take Murphy (played by Karl Glusman, photo, left), the hero of Love. He’s a swarthy American in his mid-twenties who bops around Paris, France, introducing himself as an aspiring film-maker. His apartment is decorated with oversize movie posters (M, Salò, The Birth of a Nation), and he comes on like an obsessive artist, but Noé (who wrote the script) doesn’t give Murphy one line in which he actually seems engaged with having a film career. Is he supposed to be a callow poseur? A mere symbol of youthful bohemia? It’s hard to tell from Glusman, who, with his close-cropped hair and fake intensity comes off like a bad soap-opera version of Mark Ruffalo; he’s all bluster and no depth.
The film is entirely in English, and that’s the first problem with Aomi Muyock’s performance as Electra (photo, right), Murphy’s anything-goes Parisian lover. This newcomer of an actress has a crooked raunchy grin that gives her the look of a vamp out of an R Crumb cartoon, but her heavily accented line readings are woefully inexpressive. This seems to be Noé’s way of viewing Electra entirely through the prism of her femme-fatale sexuality, as if what she had to say didn’t matter much. It’s a strategy that isn’t so much daring as it is corny and dated.
I should mention that Noé tells his story backwards. And what a mistake that proves to be! It’s a gambit that worked powerfully in Irreversible, but, in Love, it has the effect of making the compulsive connection between Murphy and Electra look less and less charged as it goes along.
Early on, Murphy is with another woman, the tender and demure Omi (played by Klara Kristin), with whom he has a baby boy. It turns out that she was the couple’s next-door neighbor, and that he got involved with her after they’d had a threesome. He’s torn, for a while, between having the family that has squashed his freedom and living inside the memory of amorous abandon offered by Electra. It’s a situation that a number of young parents could probably relate to, but as soon as Love reaches the point in the narrative where Murphy’s family doesn’t yet exist, the stakes just seem diminished. We’re staring at heightened snapshots of a doomed relationship that looks as if it was never meant to last. How much can we be invested in it?
Back in 1970, Terry Southern wrote a satirical novel called Blue Movie about a celebrated director (loosely based on Stanley Kubrick) who decides, as an experiment, to make a big-budget pornographic film with famous actors having sex right on camera. The book was a light comedy, but it tapped into a concept that was hotly debated at the time: could a sexually explicit movie also be a real movie? Forty-five years later, that experiment has been conducted just often enough that we now have an answer, and it is this: yes, a sexually explicit movie can be a real movie. But it’s a challenge to make it a good movie.
The first time it was tried arguably remains the most powerful: Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (released in 1976), a tale of sensual obsession that veered so shockingly into blood and depravity that the explicit on-screen coupling truly became a source of high drama. More recently, the hard-core art film has come to seem a stunt, whether it’s a sodden dud like Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs or a show-off ramble like Lars von Trier’s endlessly unconvincing Nymphomaniac. Yet, two years ago, Blue is the Warmest Colour, while it featured intimately staged eroticism rather than “actual” sex, proved that a film could invite the audience to stop in its tracks and watch a ten-minute-long scene of breathless naked coupling that was never less than riveting. Love doesn’t live up to that standard. It’s bold, fleshy and audacious, at least in theory. But it is also numb.

Rico says he won't be seeing this one...