When the poster dropped for Love, the new and very adult-oriented romance from filmmaker Gaspar Noé (Irreversible, Enter the Void), it sent a bit of a shockwave through the film Internet—being, as it was, a super-explicit image more at home on a porn site than Film Comment. And the film itself was courting the same incongruity; after all, we’re talking about a 3D film that was reportedly shocking in its borderline-hardcore content, in which the idiosyncratic filmmaker aimed to give men “a hard-on” and “make girls cry.”
In other words, as with Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac , what we have here is a provocative foreign director deliberately blurring the line between art film and pornography. So it’s a bit surprising that the first domestic trailer for Love is, at worst, a PG-13, emphasizing the romantic longing at the story’s center rather than the explicit couplings (and triplings, and so on) that have thus far generated so much chatter.
Here’s that first trailer, which premiered on Vice (insert Vice joke here):
Love opens October 30 in limited release.