4th of July 2025 Marathoning

Going into Gaspar Noé’s Love (2015), I didn’t really know what to expect, really, and at the onset this film isn’t a celebration of intense sexuality. The male lead of the film is miserable as he feels trapped in a relationship with a lovely blond due to an accidental pregnancy. He doesn’t love her, and she clearly, if subtly, provokes his misery (there’s a comment about his gut sticking out, and a pointed reference to “how babies are born”). He longs to just fuck. He wants pleasure without the unnecessary entrapment of a legit relationship. A broken condom and an ejaculation initiate this sudden change in the lead’s life. It interrupts his bacchanal. This is a major buzzkill which alters what has been a sexually adventure. It forewarns of what such unbridled sexual behavior might include. If anything, this development sets fire to his loss of Electra, the woman he truly, obsessively clings to. Ironically, it is their carefree sexual lifestyle that eventually encourages this new woman to enter their lives...and tear them apart.