Movie Review: Gaspar Noe’s fourth film is no ordinary “Love”.

The enfant terrible label isn’t looking terribly hot on onetime cinematic hell-raiser Gaspar Noe — at least not as good as it once did. Noe’s films were once genuinely upsetting, sometimes even stomach-churning: we all remember the nine-minute uncut rape sequence from “Irreversible”, not to mention that film’s horrific opening, where a man’s skull is bashed to a pulp until it resembles chunks of ripe watermelon. Then there’s “I Stand Alone,” his truly nasty first feature, which painted a stark portrait of despair and mental illness that watched unflinchingly as a misanthropic, xenophobic horse butcher descended into mayhem and murder, all in the name of ostensibly saving his daughter (who may have not even needed or wanted to be saved in the first place). 2009’s drug freakout “Enter the Void,” which owed a great deal of its neon sleaze to Seijun Suzuki, seemed to mark the beginning of a more inward-gazing, impressionistic phase for the famously reactionary director. But even that movie was a skillfully made arthouse put-on that belied the director’s real interest: unchecked self-obsession. It’s a thematic concern that gets stretched pretty thin in the director’s newest opus “Love,” which is about as romantic as a quickie in a gas station bathroom, and possesses roughly the same degree of staying power. It’s visceral, but icky, all but forcing a reaction out the viewer. “You HAVE to respond to this,” you can imagine Noe yelling. “Don’t you understand this is ART?”

Well, yes and no. The obvious point is that despite all the fucking, sucking, licking, kissing and acrobatic gyrating onscreen, “Love” isn’t really a movie about sex. Nor is it, as its title may suggest, about love. No, “Love”, like all the movies I discussed in the first paragraph, is really about Gaspar Noe. In his first few movies, Noe’s seemingly boundless solipsism found its outlet in thrilling and unusual ways: his inherent (some might rightly say adolescent) distrust of innate human goodness was the narrative catalyst that gave “Irreversible” its fuming sense of bitterness and rage. Similarly, it’s easy to watch “I Stand Alone” and feel like it’s a movie that Noe had to purge, something he had to get out of his system before he exploded.

However, “Love” takes the director’s penchant for navel-gazing to its most laughable extremes: the main character is a callous film nerd obsessed with sex and death, there’s an infant child named Gaspar and the director himself even appears at one point as a slimy art dealer with a terrible haircut. As in “Enter the Void,” “Love” is an upturned cinematic middle finger that’s littered with cursory cinematic shout-outs to some of the director’s favorite flicks (sadly, no “Cannibal Holocaust” references this time around). The movie’s protagonist goes on at length about his love for Stanley Kubrick’s “2001,” for instance. Posters for Fritz Lang’s “M” and, inexplicably, “Birth of a Nation” can be seen hanging in the character’s apartment. And yet these self-congratulating reference points barely dig beneath the surface and offer nothing in the way of penetrating insight as far as the characters or their respective plights. Like a lot of the other stuff in “Love,” these little “yay us” cinematic in-jokes are mere signifiers of cool, as bereft of substance in their way as bad fast food.

If you think dialogue like “a dick has one purpose… to fuck. And I fucked it all up” is really where it’s at, “Love” might just be the movie for you. Opening on a rapturous shot of two supple naked bodies jerking each other off with close-eyed, heavy-panting ecstasy, “Love” eventually becomes the story of sluggish, insufferable Murphy, (Karl Glusman, to be seen next in Nicolas Winding Refn’s upcoming “The Neon Demon”) an American expat living in Paris. Undeniably well-endowed but noticeably lacking any sort of charisma and curiosity in regards to the world around him, Murphy spends his days in Paris ravenously consuming movies, talking about his penis, having sex with his foxy female plaything Electra and occasionally feeling sorry for himself. A great many of his more private thoughts are surmised in tender bits of voiceover, including “she smells like shit” and “I hate this bitch”. That Murphy, what a charmer. The bulk of the movie’s drama involves the young, pigheaded man’s rotating romantic dynamic, where he ping-pongs between Electra, who is sexually and emotionally uninhibited, and another woman named Omi that he eventually impregnates after a sloppy one night stand results in a burst condom and a lot of awkward, hushed explanations.

Actually, ‘drama’ might be too strong a word for it. Not much actually happens in “Love” — which is okay, given that Noe’s movies have never boasted traditional dramatic structures. For once, what’s off-putting about Noe’s work isn’t the sordid subject matter: it’s the seemingly unimpeded sense of self-pity on display. Being an immature white dude with a big dick, man — shit’s tough. Granted, there were a few fleeting moments where I could detect glimpses of recognizable human behavior beneath Murphy’s thuggish veneer, but more often than not, my thoughts on the guy were of a “geez, what an asshole” variety. Again, this is okay — some of our greatest movie characters, from Jake La Motta to Bobby Dupea, have been assholes. But they had dreams, hopes, ambitions — they wanted something that existed outside of themselves. They had plans, however twisted or self-serving those plans might have been. Murphy, on the contrary, harbors no such aspirations. He simply wishes to have casual, undemanding sex with any woman he wants, then to get moody when he’s asked to make a serious decision. Yawn.

Lots of “Love” feels like bad teenage poetry — sophomoric and embarrassing, the kind of stuff you no doubt feel deeply, but probably shouldn’t share. Clearly, no one ever told Noe that some dramatic exercises are meant to be cherished by the creators and the creators alone. And yet there are undeniable moments of beauty and invention beneath all the blood, bile and semen on display in “Love”. Noe is, as always, a formidable filmmaker with a gift for both framing as well as hallucinatory color schemes that many of his peers would envy. He’s always had an undeniable knack for staging sex and violence, and his films at their best recall the energy of an scuzzier Abel Ferrara if he had stayed up all night, wigging out to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Holy Mountain”. And yet, even when compared to Noe’s famously controversial early work, “Love” feels pretty limp. It postures and wants us to be shocked; it tries to get us emotionally invested in the drama onscreen and then gently mocks us for caring. It contains the single most embarrassing use of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” I’ve ever seen in a movie, and it will probably be a while until I can listen to that song again without cringing. During scenes such as these, you inevitably find yourself asking: “what kind of movie am I watching?” Then you remember, that’s right: a Gaspar Noe movie. C