Rent Love (2015)

Despite a weak script & strange choices, this is a very sweet & extremely honest film - Love review by TB

I have never really worked out how I feel about Gaspar Noë. His films have always provoked unbelievably fierce controversy, sometimes for good reason. The only one of his films I had seen in any way before Love was Irréversible, which I didn't manage to make all the way through, switching off at the scene which got most people: the 9 minute single-take anal rape scene. It was just the most horrific, sadistic thing to watch and after 5 minutes, I had had enough. But I won't lie, leading up to that point, I wasn't particularly into the film anyways. What Irréversible was to me, and what I have heard other people also say, is that Noë is a deliberate provocateur. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but the story around those provocations has to be good enough to justify it. Whilst it did raise some interesting questions, it just didn't work as a whole.

But when I heard about Love, I was genuinely interested, mainly because it was trying to do something different, in that it was deliberately using real sex with proper actors to tell a story of love & break-ups. It was also a lot lighter than Noë's previous work. And I thought that the provocative element of Noë would be a very interesting driving force behind the camera. The other thing about this film was when I watched it, it was in a cinema full of Noë fans, so the atmosphere was that much more electric and did enhance my viewing.

The result is that I did enjoy Love a lot more than I thought I would do. The first scene is a very amusing two-fingers up to anyone who was watching who was easily shocked. Over the course of 5 minutes, Karl Glusman's character Murphy is pleasured to completion by Electra in an unbroken single take. This sets the tone and also provoked a lot of laughter. Then after that, the film properly started and began to recount Murphy's life leading up to the frantic phone call from Electra's mother, who's daughter and Murphy's ex had been missing. We see the standard falling in love, then Murphy and Electra deciding that what they both wanted was a threesome with the beautiful woman who had moved in next door. This then starts the catalyst for everything to fall apart.

As much as I gave it 3 stars, that in no way was because of the acting and performances. Karl Glusman is a very enigmatic & good lead, managing to hold the film together well. Aomi Muyock & Klara Kristin as Electra and Omi give brave & vulnerable performances too. For me the biggest problem with this film is quite simply that nothing much happens. Murphy claims to be a filmmaker and incessantly talks about creating movies, but never actually does anything apart from wax lyrical about his greatness. The film itself also doesn't seem to know what it wants to do. The build-up to the threesome (because a lot of the people who rent this know something about the film, it isn't a natural choice for most people looking to rent a movie to watch on a Friday night,) is done effectively, but then once it's over, the film is effectively rudderless.

But there is much to be enjoyed here and there is some genuine boundary pushing, just don't expect a masterpiece or much of a plot. Just enjoy being around the characters and the world that Gaspar Noë creates.