3D sex epic shocks at Cannes festival

Published May 21, 2015

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Cannes, France - A 3D hardcore sex odyssey about a ménage à trois sent shockwaves across the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday.

Argentinian-born director Gaspar Noe’s Love, which shows the full gambit of sex from full frontal nudity, ejaculation, through to a night of passion between a man, his girlfriend and a transsexual as well as graphic group sex, premiered at midnight in Cannes.

Noe's films have had a habit of shocking Cannes festivalgoers.

But Love is without the violence that was a feature of his earlier films such as Irreversible and Enter the Void.

The faint-hearted were warned by the director to leave the cinema before the final scene of his 1998 film Seul Contre Tous (I Stand Alone), which featured incestuous sexual abuse.

More than 200 people fled the Cannes premiere of Irreversible, which included a violent rape scene. But this time around, Love did not prompt any major walkouts.

“The only violence in the whole film (Love) is how people who are madly in love insult each other,” Noe wrote in the Cannes programme.

He said his idea in making Love was to celebrate sex and not to portray it in a moralistic way as has been the case in other more mainstream movies.

Love, which stars Switzerland’s Aomi Muyock as Electra and America’s Karl Glusman as Murphy, was screened out of competition. This means that it is not in the running for any of the festival’s top awards.

In the film, Murphy is living in Paris as a student where he meets Electra, with whom he embarks on a life-changing love affair.

The world’s leading film festivals seem to have recently developed a penchant for screening contentious sex films.

Love’s Cannes debut followed the February premiere at the Berlin Film Festival of British director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s erotic S&M drama Fifty Shades of Grey.

Last year, both Berlin and the Venice Film Festival premiered two separate volumes of Danish director Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac about a woman recounting her life of sexual desires and conquests.

 

DPA

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