Light up the Void  

On the Croisette, Gaspar Noé has never been a filmmaker like any other. Presenting Love in the Official Selection at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, the Argentine director once again turned the press conference into a performance, extending the radical nature of his cinema into the realm of discourse.

From the moment it was announced, controversy preceded the images. Love, a 3D romantic melodrama, promised unsimulated sex scenes and an uncompromising portrayal of desire. In Cannes, anticipation was electric. Facing journalists, Noé appeared true to form: relaxed, provocative, occasionally irritated, and refusing any kind of moral justification.

The filmmaker quickly dismissed the pornographic label. For him, Love is first and foremost “a sentimental story,” the chronicle of a consuming and destructive passion. Showing sex without ellipsis, he argued, is the only honest way to speak about love, jealousy, and loss. “Violence is easily accepted in cinema, but desire is not,” he remarked, denouncing what he sees as a deeply ingrained hypocrisy in the Western gaze.

Asked about his use of 3D, Noé became almost pedagogical. Far from spectacle, the technology serves to bring bodies closer, to heighten intimacy, and to immerse the viewer in a sensual, melancholic memory. Here, 3D becomes an emotional tool, in service of what he describes as one of his most personal films.

The exchanges were at times tense. Certain questions about provocation or the film’s place at Cannes visibly annoyed the director, who fully embraced the divisive nature of his work. He seeks neither consensus nor respectability, preferring a cinema that unsettles over one that reassures.



By the end of the conference, one thing was clear: Love would leave no one indifferent. As is often the case with Gaspar Noé, the film and its public presentation merged into a single radical gesture. In Cannes, the filmmaker reminded audiences that love, when shown without filters, remains one of contemporary cinema’s last great taboos.