Revered Argentinian filmmaker Gaspar Noe’s latest, widely-discussed feature, Love has generated yet another wave of controversy in Melbourne this week. The film, which is shot in 3D and contains a plethora of unchoreographed sexually explicit scenes inspired by Noe’s love for 70s softcore pornography, was released for a series of special screenings at Hawthorn’s Lido cinema. Love’s marketing campaign, which in Melbourne involved an image of three entangled tongues and a still from the film’s notable scene of a penis ejacualting, has been removed by the City of Yarra council deeming it “offensive”. Enacting Melbourne’s graffiti management policy that prohibits explicit and offensive imagery, the gesture has perpetuated the ongoing art-vs-porn discourse surrounding Love. Noe, who has reiterated his intentions in portraying the “ecstatic, painful, addictive” nature of love and sex, has dismissed these binaries, explaining in a recent Vanity Fair interview that, “I like making movies that are like life”.
Both Exile Entertainment, the film’s distributor, and Lido Cinema have denied their use of the penis image in their marketing and claim to only circulating the subtler images of kissing and underwear.
Premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and initially released to Australian audiences as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival program, Love adds to Noe’s illustrious filmography of works such as Enter The Void and Irréversible. Lido’s screening of Love ended last night.