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“I remember my mother, on my eighteenth birthday, she brought me to see Pasolini’s Salò,” Gaspar Noé recently told us. “I said, ‘Why did you show me this?’” She said, “You’re old enough to understand human cruelty.” [Laughs] To her, it was important that I see that movie. ‘Now you’re a man. You have to face what the humankind is.'”

It’s no surprise that the director, while doing press for Love here in New York City, picked the aforementioned film upon a stop-in at the Criterion Collection closet. His other choices included Seconds (which says he had planned to remake), Pigs, Pimps, and Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura, Master of the House, Safe (a film he’s seen “two or three times”), State of Siege, Sundays and Cybèle, Jigoku, Island of Lost Souls, The Naked Prey, and his optimal double bill: Yukio Mishima‘s Patriotism and...

As much performance art as cinema, Edward Frenkel and Reine Graves short film The Rites of Love and Math is an unabashed hommage to Japanese Playwright and Novelist Yukio Mishima's 1966 film Yûkoku ("Patriotism", aka The Rite of Love and Death.)  Where Mishima's film is shocking, not only for its graphic sex, and even more graphic seppuku (which foreshadowed Mishima's own suicide four years later and made the film an unreleased, rare, cult curio until given its first commercial release by The Criterion Collection in 2008) due to political strife, the 2010 remake changes to focus to math and science.  A mathematician discovers the formula for Love itself, and is beset by the powers that be, possibly to use it as a weapon.  In a last ditch effort to protect his secret, he tattoos it on his own lover before committing his own suicide (proving the pen is, well, about equal to the sword.