Review: ‘Love,’ Gaspar Noé’s Romance Told Through Sex

“Love,” the fourth, and easily the least unsettling, feature from the Argentine director Gaspar Noé, has but one goal: To tell the story of a romance entirely through sex. This ambition may be straightforward, but it is far from simple, as will become abundantly clear if you closely monitor your responses to its unsimulated explicitness.

You’ll have plenty of opportunity, as Mr. Noé gets down to business immediately with an interlude of mutual masturbation that introduces Murphy (Karl Glusman), an American film student living in Paris, and his lover, Electra (Aomi Muyock).

(It also acquaints us with Murphy’s preening member, which has a starring role and a much livelier personality than its owner.) From there, we move back and forth in time and from one bed to another as the couple meet and bond, argue and copulate in a variety of configurations and with an assortment of partners.

Many of these squelchy encounters have a dreamy eroticism and a hazy beauty that owe less to the performers (though one threesome is like the naughtiest game of Twister ever) than to the significant skills of the cinematographer, Benoît Debie.

Hovering above the dancing tongues and torsos, or sitting quietly alongside them, his camera calmly observes without resorting to tricks or distractions. This visual tranquillity, along with the characters’ heightened emotions, strips the film of salaciousness and highlights the only conversation it cares about: The one that runs from between the legs to between the ears.

In the context of a movie-rating culture that, in America at least, has deemed the orgasm more offensive than the Uzi, “Love” has a touching innocence that diverges radically from Mr. Noé’s back catalog. Lacking both the stylistic bling of his trippy 2010 feature, “Enter the Void,”

and the shocking violence of “Irrevérsible” (2002), this latest venture casts the writer and director less as provocateur than as evangelist. His images hum with a melancholic nostalgia (remember pubic hair?), and his faith in the power of great sex — and a script that talks of little else — to support an almost two-and-a-quarter-hour feature is surprisingly sweet.

And ultimately misplaced. As if all its artistic energy had been gobbled up by the fornication, “Love” has nothing left with which to build its characters or set them in motion. A spider-web story unfolds in flashback as Murphy, now with a new partner (Klara Kristin)

and an accidental toddler, learns that Electra has gone missing and spirals into bitter self-loathing. There’s a lot to loathe, as Mr. Glusman, an indifferent actor playing an unlikable jerk, mopes and rants in depressed voice-over. The picture might be filmed in unnecessary 3-D, but in every other respect, it’s exasperatingly one-dimensional.

Operating as a stand-in for his director — whose name graces two of the movie’s characters, whose face appears briefly as Electra’s former lover and whose penis has its own cameo — Murphy, like the women he pleasures, is a cipher.