Karl Glusman and Aomi Muyock (Alchemy)

”I wanna make movies out of blood, sperm and tears.”

So says Murphy (Karl Glusman), a young film student in Paris and an obvious stand-in for director Gaspar Noé in the self-indulgent and literally masturbatory 3D sex drama Love.

The bad-boy director shocked audiences in the past with the brutal violence of Irreversible, which had the benefit of a powerful story and performers like Monica Belluci, who could actually act. But the stars of Love seem to have been hired not for acting chops but for the size of their genitals and what they were willing to do with them on camera.

The movie opens with Murphy and his wife in the kind of uncomfortable sexual position designed to show the camera as much of two naked bodies as possible. Love immediately sets you up for its sexual frankness; what it doesn’t prepare you for is how terribly boring it is. After a little death, we first hear Murphy’s inner monologue, full of self-important banalities like, “it’s so painful, Maybe it’s better not to love at all.”

Maybe it’s better not to hear what Murphy’s thinking at all. Then again, what he says aloud is just as bad: “Do you know what my biggest dream in life is? To make a move that truly depicts sentimental sexuality. Why haven’t we seen this in cinema?”

It’s possible we have seen this in cinema, though not here, nor in other recent sexually explicit films like Nymphomaniac and Stranger by the Lake. Those films may have lured voyeuristic audiences with promises of graphic sex, but they also had scripts that were more than just a laundry list of self-serving pap.

Noé can’t help but be self-referential. One of Murphy’s assignations take place in what looks like the same underground passage where Belluci is viciously assaulted in Irreversible. The whole film seems to be an exercise in navel-gazing, and worse.

The film’s one spark comes from an external source: Funkadelic. Ten-minute guitar solo “Maggot Brain” is the inspired score to a threesome (which the 17-yeard old ingénue that Murphy and his then-girlfriend meet is naturally into). But the logical and emotional structure of Eddie Hazel’s wailing guitar acts circles around the trio of writhing bodies. Legend has it that George Clinton told Hazel to play as if he’d just learned his mother died; the mournful electricity that results would lend any movie scene an aura of intense, passionate dignity.

Which may mean that Hazel should be posthumously nominated for best director. The guitarist seems to get better performances out of this inept cast than Noé does. Much of the remaining score has the nerve to suggest the circular figures of Bernard Hermann’s score for Vertigo, a tale of love and obsession that was a beautifully acted masterpiece. I didn’t get a chance to preview Love in 3D, which spared me the added dimension of its star climaxing directly into the camera. “Maybe this is all just shit,” Murphy says near the end of this seemingly interminable movie. You called it, Gaspar.

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Love
Written and directed by Gaspar Noé
With Aomi Muyock, Karl Glusman, Klara Kristin.
Unrated. Contains graphic sexual content
135 minutes
Opens today at Angelika Pop-Up (in 2D only) and Angelika Mosaic.