UPDATE: Director Gaspar Noé will NOT be attendance at tonight’s screening. The star of the film, Karl Glusman, will be in attendance instead. Okay, ANOTHER update—Cinema 21 now tells us that both Noé and Glusman WILL probably be in attendance after all. So… we’ll see, I guess? —Ed.
Love, cinematic provocateur Gaspar Noé’s fourth feature, will likely stir up a similar conversation that recently led to Playboy‘s decision to stop printing nude pictures in their magazine. Why would anyone pay to watch two hours of an expressively lit and beautiful couple doing naughty things when online porn is free of charge?
You can ask Noé just that when he visits Portland to attend the November 4 screening of Love. He might answer in the same way his onscreen stand-in Murphy (Karl Glusman) does within the film. An American film student living in Paris, the young man explains that he wants to show “sentimental sexuality”—raw fucking as passionate as a first kiss—in the cinema.
Noé succeeds in that, at least.