If last year, with Adieu au langage, we were finally able to see 3DвЂ™s voice crack, Love might be best taken as its first date: a dumb, awkward, unseasoned, and horny experience that is best forgotten in the long term but serves as a logical and necessary step for now. For a myriad of technological and social reasons, this current 3D wave is the first thatвЂ™s been sustained long enough for us to get a stereoscopic porno that we have the opportunity to take somewhat seriously. Stereoscopic cinema has never had an opportunity to mature, because all the fads that have ever brought it into the market have been so short-lived when it periodically (re-)emerges, it can only function, like any novel cinematic technology, as an attraction-a show, a ride, a spectacle. He said at the filmвЂ™s Cannes press conference that he wanted to try out 3D because it was like a new game for him to play and that it is a вЂњchildishвЂќ medium, and in some sense heвЂ™s right. LoveвЂ™s employment of stereoscopy, then, is curious in that NoГ© has essentially appropriated the technology without any apparent ambitions of subverting or pushing against its usual functions. But save for a couple of quasi-psychedelic interludes that appear to be paying 3D homage to Jordan Belson and Anthony McCall, Love plays it pretty straight for better and worse, La rГ©gion sexuelle this decidedly is not. All of the shots are conjoined by brief seconds of black, as if to suggest a long blink or a momentary lapse in consciousness, Г la Enter the Void (2009). A number of shots are filmed from overhead, looking down at the characters in the cramped, usually sunless interiors, and occasionally these compositions are framed-usually during the lovemaking scenes-so that their bodies are coming in from the top of the frame rather than the bottom, creating a slight disorientation with respect to gravity. The single dominant aesthetic gesture in this film composed almost entirely of static, medium two-shots (apparently weary of inducing 3D headaches, NoГ© was interested in little other than pleasure here) is its use of stereoscopic photography. Having spent his career investigating manвЂ™s most primal and animalistic instincts, in Love NoГ© aims to grapple with the often contradictory correlation between the wild and woolly libido and that perhaps more conservative urge to settle into a monogamous family unit, both steered more or less by that crazy little thing called love. Love is, said and done, a 3D pornographic film running 135 minutes, with at least half of that running time spent watching a trio of young, conventionally attractive individuals (who either are or should be non-actors) having unsimulated sex. To watch one of NoГ©вЂ™s movies is to have been made hyper-aware of cinemaвЂ™s faculties for manipulating our perception of time via components that lie outside of plot progression, character arcs, and acting abilities.ДЄll of which is to say that if weвЂ™re going to pick on NoГ©вЂ™s new movie, letвЂ™s at least do it in terms that are relevant to what itвЂ™s actually trying to do. Rather, it manoeuvres through its arena of texture, light, and bodies-as NoГ©вЂ™s cinema so often does-according to jagged, up-and-across movements, starting and pausing its plot in a manner more characteristic of lower (pornographic) or higher (avant-garde) cinematic traditions, allowing the erotics, spectacles, or poetics to suspend our attention in bodily experiences. But the way that Love works with time isnвЂ™t horizontal as in traditional narrative cinema linear, cause-and-effect relations are hardly its chief concern. By this I donвЂ™t mean there isnвЂ™t a plot there is, and itвЂ™s indeed a very NoГ©-esque one, backtracking through a relationshipвЂ™s trajectory in order to rediscover a blissful origin.

Then again, Love isnвЂ™t really aspiring to narrative-movie objectives. ItвЂ™s been both amusing and disheartening to watch fellow critics lash out against Argentine-born вЂњFrench extremistвЂќ Gaspar NoГ©вЂ™s new movie, a 3D porno un-ironically titled Love, for failing to achieve such вЂњgood movieвЂќ goals as вЂњacting excellence,вЂќ вЂњbelievable chemistry,вЂќ or вЂњnaturalistic dialogue.вЂќ Admittedly, LoveвЂ™s execution of these basic tenets of narrative filmmaking is shoddy in comparison to other recent attempts to introduce frank sexuality into upper-middlebrow markets, such as Nymphomaniac (2013) and LвЂ™inconnu du lac (2013). Originally published in Cinema Scope 63 (Summer 2015).

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