Love, 24 Frames

Two is company...in Love

Gaspar Noe's Love is overlong, self-indulgent and indifferently acted, but retains enough traces of Noe's artistry to maintain my interest throughout. The narrative, as before in Noe's work, is told largely in flashback, so we only learn the backstory of the imploded romantic triangle after the fact. Murphy is a would be American filmmaker who falls for Electra and moves into her Paris apartment. There, they act upon a mutual fantasy by seducing a young German girl, Omi, who lives in an adjoining flat. Murphy has a further dalliance with Omi, unbeknownst to Electra, and impregnates her. Electra dumps him in a fury and he moves in with Omi. A son is born named Gaspar (cough, cough), but Murphy's self-absorption and indifference leads to a parting of the ways with Omi. When Electra's mother calls and says she has been missing for some time, he realizes that it is Electra he truly loves.

Love, which was released in theaters in 3D, is notable for its lengthy, almost monotonous sex scenes. Nevertheless, as Prince sang, there is joy in repetition. The sex scenes are shot with the lovers foregrounded with the bed clothes as a canvas like backdrop.This painterly technique drains these scenes of the messy tumult of passion; unlike in, say, Fleabag. Noe uses this technique in other intimate scenes, notably Murphy playing happily with young Gaspar. The sex scenes have the sensual, aesthetic and transgressive qualities that Noe sought, but lack emotional impact because his characters aren't fleshed out. Noe has always been an indifferent director of actors. Klara Kristin and especially Aomi Muyock do well enough with their under drawn parts, but Karl Glusman is a washout as Murphy.

Noe stresses Murphy's emotional isolation by filming most of the exterior scenes with tracking shots focused on the back of his head. I also suspect this made post-production looping easier. Noe himself plays a gallery owner, amping up the self-reflexive nature of this postmodern and ponderous work. Film references abound: 2001, The Birth of a Nation, M, etc. The confessional nature of the film suggests Noe is making amends for his callow youth, when, as with most males, the pleasures of the flesh held more allure than empathy.

I think Love is Noe's worst film, but still found it diverting and provocative. Love functions more as an art project than a film narrative and I certainly could have done without the money shot. Climax would have been a more suitable title to this film than Love, but Noe saved it for his next, better film.

Abbas Kiarostami's 24 Frames is a suitable valedictory to a singular career. Like Love, it is more of an art project than a narrative film, but I found it much more engrossing. 24 Frames consists of 24 short films that animate photos and, in the initial short, Brueghel's painting Winter. The camera is fixed, usually on a natural setting, as creatures enter and leave the frame. The shorts are all about five minutes long and they all fade to black.

The lack of drama and "action" works to open the viewer up to gradations of light, the choreography of movement and the intensity of sounds. Rarely has the soundtrack of a film been utilized with such sensual intensity. Each grain of sand or coo of a dove radiates and reverberates.

The film shows how digital technology can be used for more than bells and whistles. Kiarostami is more akin to Godard than the Hollywood CGI of comic book colors, easter eggs and explosions. If there is something to be drawn from 24 Frames besides its visual splendor, it would be its meditation on nature's predations; a fitting epitaph for an artist facing his mortality.

One of the 24 Frames