Murphy (Karl Glusman) is in a less-than-ideal relationship with the mother of his son. He despises his partner Omi (Klara Kristin) and blames her for his miserable life. As he wakes up on the first of January, he replays his past in his head. He remembers the time when he first met Omi and his journey with the love of his life, Electra (Aomi Muyock). Murphy goes on a journey of great emotion, and audiences are given an in-depth look at his emotionally draining past.
Writer and director Gasper Noé created a sexually charged story of love, loss and betrayal. His film comes dangerously close to being considered pornographic, and this effectively narrows the number of people who might consider this art or compelling on any level. The story centers on the three-way relationship of Murphy, Electra and Omi and the dark journey it leads them on. As they say, sex sells. This has been proven time and time again, and Noé’s film uses sex to attract audiences and keep them engaged throughout. Without the sexual aspect of the film, it seems that viewers would have inevitably become bored with the film and the story as much of what takes place is quite fractured and lacks enough emotion to connect to audiences. From the opening moments of the film, Murphy is drawn back and forth between his past and his present. The timeline was anything but linear, and it made following the story a chore rather than a pleasure. Fractured pieces of Murphy’s past are mixed with his dystopian present, and it often became difficult to determine what was happening and when.
As the film progressed and the timeline is made a bit more clear, the continued connection between the characters in the film and the audience is sex. Audiences are compelled to follow the story as they anticipate Murphy’s next sexual encounter. As there were literally dozens of sex scenes sprinkled throughout the film, audiences were regularly tangeled in the increasingly twisted tale of love and romance.
Noé seems to have created a story that could have held a lot of weight and pleased a great number of viewers, yet, his screenplay created an unpleasantly fractured product. It was sometimes too difficult to decipher the past from the present and that was an immense turnoff. It seems unlikely that sex could have been completely avoided in the film (as it was an important part of the story), however, the sexual encounters of Murphy and his friends overshadowed the main storyline. A story of mystery and emotion was present throughout, however, like previously mentioned, sex caused that story to be obscured and made it difficult to enjoy the other aspects. The film’s saving grace (and Noé’s greatest contribution to the story) was the ideas surrounding love. Hatred, sex, passion, emotion, deception and every other theme stems from love and the role it plays in Murphy’s (and our) life. This, sadly, does not become truly relevant until the latter half of the film and makes the first half completely dependent on sex.
The film had characteristics that when presented in the correct manner, could have helped to produce an engaging and fulfilling product. The ruptured story and the intense sex (that overshadowed the actual plot) took away from the film and made it difficult to for audiences to appreciate the lesson that Noé wanted to present to audiences. That lesson was that love often dictates our lives and the lives of the people around us and that allowing it to consume us can lead us down a rocky road toward self-destruction. This is a beautiful sentiment, but it takes a backseat to sex and ultimately gives viewers a skewed understanding of love and an uneven understanding of the film. I was conflicted from beginning to end; I sat on the fence between appreciation and rejection. I never fell one way or the other, and I sit here confused about whether the morals were enough for me to accept the film as successful or if the sex was too overbearing to allow this film to constitute as acceptable. Maybe that is what Noé had hoped for; maybe his goal was to force audiences to question their own morals and their own beliefs, and, if this was his intention, he was successful. He was certainly authentic and true to himself, and that might just be the most important thing.
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