The Sexiest Movie Never Made

Little matters whether Gaspar Noe's French drama "Love" (2015) is a porno-flick or a tasteful porno-flick. It isn't just about the sex in its 135 minutes, okay? But a dangerous menage a trois, unspooling creamily lit bodies into dance-like sculptures as they copulate and fall away like all doomed-to-fail relationships. Sorta.

I've never watched a Gaspar Noe movie for the same reason I've never heard about him. But a quick search dredged up numerous results of how, beside the underground director's previous films (i.e. Irreversible, Enter the Void), "Love" was bore, a letdown, a beautiful hazy dream that's also disappointingly softcore- for a movie that pronounced itself hardcore with 3D come-flying stunts by actor Karl Glusman's penis. Gaspar Noe is second to Lars Von Trier, after the latter got banned from Cannes for being a Nazi sympathizer. What both men have in common, however, is the titular "enfant terrible" title they share of in cinema. Misfits don't make blockbusters- they make artful underdog films like "Love", for fans.

Thusly, my virgin experience at Noe's titillating melodrama.

Within 30 minutes into the intimate space Noe staged,  I was stupefied, amused, empathetic, and- also- very bored. While not all at once, I was delighted by the unsuspecting intro of watching two people whacking each other off. There, naked, Murphy (Klusman) has a finger in his later-known girlfriend Electra (Aomi Muyock), who's returning the favor as she holds onto his penis like a crutch. But unlike the erotically charged Ang Lee breakthrough, "Lust, Caution", "Love" couldn't save itself from becoming a laughable morass, even after an hour into what out and out sex only the French can perform without making one feel molested just watching.

Of course, "Love" should have been a serious movie. The takeaway at the end is a tragedy of a couple's misguided trust in each other. Murphy plays a callous role in manhood's woes, and Electra is a stunning femme fatale with problems only enigmatic female characters possess (which isn't very much). Where they fortify their relationship, albeit the messes, is in the hot sex they often share. Until the threesome with their neighbor Omi (Klara Kristin), which led to the cheating, and a baby born out of wedlock, watching Murphy and Electra pre-break in flashbacks was like watching two foolhardy teenagers in love profess an eternity: A shallow, regrettable experience.

Why did I submit myself to a long, tepid movie laden with depressive monologues and full-frontal private parts sliding off the screen like a Gustave Courbet painting? For the art? If only, when all I felt in the merits lost- Benoit Debie has staged remarkable love scenes here, especially in the bordello glow of Murphy's bedroom- was a sense of restlessness. Who knew sex could be boring? Watching "Love" was like watching strangers getting it on in their Parisian apartments through a peephole. And without any depth, the characters quickly became flat and stale, when they should've been as deep and total as their thickets of pubic hair.

Yes, I definitely watched it for the sex. No shame.

Okay Cupid, You're Fired.

Your only shot at love misfired.

Love is something I have spent days, nights, and every minute of my boyhood dreaming of. But that never comes true to real life. In reality, love has failed me dramatically. In the raw, I don't know what love means to romantic partners anymore: Do you cut each other's toe nails? Braid each other's hair? Tell each other's secrets to yourselves like you've just found that out about each other yesterday? Unlike the epics as with Romeo & Juliet, your romantic love could also be an excuse to hit the racks twenty-four hours a day- without leaving the room to breathe.

Most definitively, love, mostly marred by mishaps and impulsive behaviors, a notion for which has, thus, made life bearable for the last twenty-something years, must have also belied. Because between someone whom you love and the person who loves you back, there is also an irreconcilable strain that will always devour, reject, and taint that love.

The most tiring thing about love isn't how it eats into your time (or money, if you're cheap), but rather, it's how it eats at the good parts of yourself.

For instance, my first real affair with something long term, perhaps too long, was a memory constantly referred back to as a real exhaustive trip to hell. Fights, violence, abuse, repeat. What should have been a healthy display of my first time mutated into something of a catastrophe.  There were no proper villains too (except for the roles assigned to foreplay in the bedroom), because I played the devil's advocate in damning my own relationship. Routinely, every day became a revengeful plot biting into the crust of my crumbling relationship. The returns of that relationship were so diminutive, there wasn't any love left by the time we really hit if off because we have all but exhaustively toiled through every method possible to savage it.

What I lost then, mostly my esteem, confidence, and initiation to reboot, was surmountable to what I gained over a course of self-reflexive moods and emotional turmoil: an independence unparalleled to strength, but a fear of losing myself again.

Could you smell that? It's called Rejection.

Then, love rejects. Love, as I learned later chasing after my next relationship, rejects any rational thought. It made me reject my morals, it made me reject protection. It made me crave for danger, only to be torched by the stranger whom I loved, or thought I knew to love, who never quite make out to be who he used to say he would be. Foolishly, I plunged, made the same mistakes as my impulsive, hot-blooded, younger self did. And should anyone bemoan, "I told you so..." I bypassed and brushed their comments aside as grating to the ears. Did I feel rejected when I dumped the dud whose breath was next to a tropic cancer? Yes, I did, with every molar of my moral substance. (And no, with a god to thank for, I wasn't infected.)

Sure, relationships do give us a lot, in other words. And a hell more too for a reputation when it ends. Whatever you're known for, a reveal so personal only that person whom you used to share secrets with under a blanket of corny stars and daydreams would know, will become news inasmuch as a neurotic self-serving bitch who's also tormented by his own unhappy childhood.

If all that didn't already sound familiar, have you heard about the one where the blues belted a tune for a tainted love? Well, neither have I. But somebody should make that the anthem for jilted hearts by the bar. Whether you're having a scotch or a Broken Heart Martini, be sure to lend your ears to those who gripe about their awful encounters with those who, as you like it, won't stop at nothing to take you for granted. Gracefully, I would call those the sonofabitches who a take good man for a mule. They tell you they need you, but all they want are your benefits. At whatever they could get. I'm not speaking from experience, I'm speaking for a fact as scientific as psychotic disorders. (They probably wrote the lyrics to Crazy In Love.) Should you also ever meet one, lest fall in love with one, run the other way to the bar.

You, the lover, warrior against the odds, whose chance cards seem to stack against your shot at love, who try his best to find peace in love, and love in peace, are not an idiot. Like me, you are simply fed up with having your dreams shat all over. Like you, I'm just as earnest to try, without inhibiting too much by giving too little. And why should anyone hate himself for that?