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Gaspar Noé's nearly pornographic Love in 3D started as a relatively sweet and straightforward project.
Well before his brutal Irreversible or the immersive delirium of Enter the Void, Noé dreamed up a sentimental, romantic portrait of a young couple's intimacy.
"It was a low-budget movie," Noé recalls. "No famous actors. All in French. And I would produce it myself, but when [prospective backers] read the short treatment, they kind of freaked out."
The bodily aspects of l'amour in all their turgid, quivering glory dominate the director's fourth feature, which stars Portland native Karl Glusman as a young filmmaker in Paris. About half of the 135-minute film of enthusiastic copulation is shot in Old Hollywood style.
While 3-D is usually the realm of CGI-laden summer blockbusters, Noé uses it to create intimacy. "Two years ago, I bought a home video 3-D camera," he says. "I was filming [my mother] when I noticed that the images were really touching. It felt like a puppet inside a puppet theater."
The film's bedroom romps center on a thinly veiled Americanization of Noé himself. Murphy (Glusman) gets lost in opiated reveries of his former love Electra (Aomi Muyock), but the film cuts between scenes of Murphy's idealized passion and the truth: His blinkered womanizing fueled the couple's constant fighting.
But for an arthouse skin film about compiled sadnesses, Love is surprisingly light.
"The movie is joyful today, more than I initially wanted," Noé says, "because Karl is a joyful person." Glusman's adorably doltish tendencies wring laughs from scenes of harrowing betrayal.
"I always wanted it to be funny," said Glusman. When asked about Love's most notorious scene—a cam shot, so to speak, focused on the very tip of climactic tumescence that bursts right through the screen, he demurred: "A magician must never reveal his secrets." Noé exploded in laughter: "Karl, all your secrets are out there already."
see it: Love in 3D is rated R. It screens at Cinema 21 on Wednesday, Nov. 4, with Gaspar Noé and Karl Glusman in attendance. 7 pm. Various showtimes through Nov. 12. $11.50.
Willamette Week
